A mom was struggling to get her teething baby to sleep, until she hit upon an unusual sound that “instantly” quietened him down.
Hannah Plunkett, from Kentucky, had been having a tricky time with her young son Oliver. “He’s approaching 6 months which means the teething is approaching as well,” Plunkett told Newsweek. “Soothing him sometimes is a challenge on rough days.”
Teething, the term given to the uncomfortable feeling experienced by a toddler during the eruption of a new tooth, is a common issue among new parents.
It’s also something that can lead to a variety of secondary issues. One study in the journal Pediatrics associated teething with increased biting, drooling, gum-rubbing, sucking, irritability, wakefulness, ear-rubbing, facial rash, decreased appetite for solid foods, and mild temperature elevation.
TikTok/hannplunkett
On this particular day, Plunkett was running out of ideas for how best to soothe Oliver. She estimates he had been crying on and off around 10 hours while she tried to come up with a solution. Suddenly a lightbulb went off in the young mom’s head, and she headed to YouTube.
Plunkett began searching for videos of “mechanic sounds.” While that might have seemed a random choice to some, it was an entirely logical one for Plunkett. “Oliver’s dad and grandpa are both mechanics,” she said. “My mother in law runs the front desk of the family business and actually watches our son for us during the day in the office!”
The family had previously noted how Oliver was “always very content” with his grandma at work. “Our assumption was because of the noise,” Plunkett said. To her way of thinking, the noise of mechanics working away on cars acted in much the same way white noise does for young kids.
An option often recommended for parents with young children struggling to sleep the benefits of white noise as a sleep aid for infants was most notably highlighted in a 1990 study published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood.
Researchers studying the sleep behaviors of 40 newborns found 80 percent of this group fell asleep within 5 minutes of hearing white noise.
Plunkett was at the end of her tether. “After 10 long hours we decided to test the theory,” she said. The results were captured in a video posted to TikTok under the handle @hannplunket. It shows Oliver sitting serenely in a baby swing, seemingly at peace with the world while the noise of mechanics working away is audible in the background. “He instantly settled down and stopped being fussy,” Plunkett said.
The video has blown up, amassing over 11 million views since being shared earlier this month. Its viral success has caught Plunkett by surprise. “I generally just post for fun because I enjoy it, I never expected it to blow up the way that it did,” she said.
Though she hasn’t needed to do it again quite yet, with Oliver sleeping much better the past few nights, Plunkett isn’t ruling out returning to YouTube to find more noises in the not-too-distant future.