Swaddling is thought to improve sleep and decrease crying. If true, these are very good reasons to swaddle, since the main things babies seem to like to do are cry and not sleep. And fortunately, this turns out not to be very difficult to study, since sleep is a very short-term outcome. Researchers can look at the same baby swaddled and unswaddled. This avoids a lot of our concerns about different parents doing different things with their babies.
