Bedtime massage intervention for improving infant and mother sleep condition: A randomized controlled trial

Infants' sleep disorders and parents' insufficient sleep are common problems in the infant care. The current study was conducted to assess the effectiveness of infant massage on infants' night-time sleep condition and mothers' sleep quality.

140 infants were randomly put into two different groups, experimental group with fifteen-minute bedtime messages for two weeks and the control group with normal infant routine care. The Brief Infant Sleep Questionnaire, a personal information submission form, and Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index for the mothers were the tools used to gather data in this study.

Infants in experimental group showed meaningful differences in variables such as, sleep latency (P < 0001, eta = 0.099), number of night waking (P = 0.03, eta = 0.027) and longest continuous sleep period (P = 0.03, eta = 0.026). As for other variables no meaningful differences were observed. There wasn't meaningful difference in the mother's overall night-time sleep quality between the two groups (P = 0.184, eta = 0.012) except for the duration of the mother's night-time sleep (P = 0.028, eta = 0.026) and the reduction of maternal sleep disorder (P = 0.020 eta = 0.029).

The findings indicated that infants' bedtime massages would improve some of the sleep markers of mothers and infants, and therefore, can be suggested as a practical, harmless, and cost-free method to improve sleep.