If you want your children to fall asleep through music, a study suggests that some Christmas music with a slow tempo can help. Picture: Jose Luis Pelaez, Getty Images.
The end-of-year holiday period is not always the most relaxing time for children.
Between seemingly endless family dinners and the excitement of opening presents, the youngest among us often experience disrupted sleep patterns and may even have trouble calming down at bedtime.
One study suggests that some Christmas music can help.
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But not just any song celebrating the magic of the festive season will do the trick. This research claims that certain Christmas songs help children fall asleep more than others.
Experts from the Bed Kingdom website came to this conclusion after cataloging the key characteristics of over 300 tracks in sleep-related Spotify playlists.
They then applied these criteria to different Christmas tunes to determine which would be most conducive to falling asleep.
It turns out that acoustic songs with a slow tempo (less than 100 beats per minute) lend themselves particularly well to this.
These include Mother’s Daughter’s The Secret of Christmas, Michael Bolton’s White Christmas and Michael Bublé’s Silent Night.
Most relaxing Christmas songs are melancholy ballads, such as Frank Sinatra’s I’ll Be Home for Christmas (If Only In My Dreams), Kelly Clarkson’s Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas and Doris Day’s Christmas Present.
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The self-proclaimed Queen of Christmas, Mariah Carey, does appear in this ranking, but not thanks to her famous All I Want for Christmas Is You.
Her song Christmas Time Is in The Air Again, released in 2010 on her album Merry Christmas II You, appears in tenth place thanks to its soothing tempo.
Generally speaking, if you want to help your children find sleep through music, favor Christmas songs with a slow tempo.
“Ensuring a restful night’s sleep during the festive season is of utmost importance. A carefully curated sleep playlist should help listeners unwind and recharge, with discernible features like a reduced tempo, quiet dynamics, and simple rhythm patterns,” explain the Bed Kingdom specialists.
Ten Christmas songs that should help little ones doze off easily:
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