One of the key differences between Fade Away Sleep Sounds and other white noise companies is the slow, gradual fade to silence at the end of every Fade Away Sleep Sounds track. We thought this “fade away” was so important, that we built our whole image (and name) around it. All of our Baby Sleep Sounds are 60 minutes in length, with the final 10 minutes being devoted to the decrescendo. This fade is so slow that we can’t hear the change occurring. Before you know it, you are sleeping all on your own, unaided.
So why did we choose to go this route rather than going the other, and more popular, extreme of the 6 hour, 8 hour or even 10 hour track of a particular white noise sound? Well, like most parents out there, before we introduced our kids to white noise, we did our research and turned to the experts. Unfortunately, the experts don’t really seem to agree on the issue. There’s the pro white noise camp that says, amongst other things, white noise is indeed effective, and for it to be most effective it should be played continuously during the entire sleep cycle. Then there’s the camp that’s anti white noise… who’s reasons include that our kids can become dependent on it, and that prolonged exposure to the sounds could be damaging.
Both sides made very compelling arguments, and gave many more reasons as to why their views were were the correct views. It was a lot of information to take in, and not very comforting that all these “experts” had such varying views of what was best for my babies. However, like most things in life, we decided that this wasn’t a just black and white, all good or all bad, yes or no issue… the truth was somewhere out there in the grey area. So based on that, we took the experts information and went with what seemed the most reasonable, and what would best address the needs of our kids.
It did seem reasonable to us that white noise was indeed important to babies…especially when you begin to understand what life was like (from a noise perspective) inside the womb, and how stressful a world of quiet outside of the womb can be for a baby. (See my past post, “Turn on the Noise, The Baby is Sleeping”). It also seemed reasonable to believe that if you needed something to sleep the entire time you were sleeping, and couldn’t sleep without it, that yes, maybe there could a dependency issue there.
So based on that, we decided that our tracks were only going to be a maximum of 60 minutes in duration, as we didn’t want to make a product that could potentially create a new dependency problem later. Also, as we all know, suddenly adding noise to a quiet room can be disruptive (to say the least) to someones sleep, and by the same token, suddenly taking away noise can be just as disruptive. So we decided to go with the extremely slow fade to silence, making it so slow, no one would be able to hear it happening. Essentially Fade Away Sleep Sounds are calming your baby while helping get them to sleep, and weaning your baby off of the sounds at the same time. It’s getting them to sleep but then letting them sleep on their own.
It’s a slightly different philosophy then what the other guys are doing, but it worked for our kids, and it’s been working for thousands of others as well.