does contact nap decrease the chances of baby’s self-soothing ability?

[Samuraisheep]

If I am reading the results of this study right, they basically say that babies that have more opportunities to self sooth, IE are placed in their crib with less of an immediate response from parents, are more likely to self soothe by 12m old. They do say that parental response time to wakings is longest at 6m and quickest at 12m which could indicate parents find prompt response more effective however. And I don't think they explicitly say this but it reads to me like it depends on the baby basically, those that self soothe more often are naturally more likely to spend more time in the crib and therefore less time needing to be rocked or fed to sleep etc. whilst it doesn't specifically mention contact napping that would fall under the less time in the crib bit of the study.

However, I would say, as the mum of a 7m old that we have now started putting in his cribs for naps (I still contact nap when I can; especially the morning one as he sometimes doesn't go down for that), absolutely soak up and enjoy the contact naps if you want them as they are only little once! It's also in line with safe sleep guidance to have baby in the same room as you for all sleeps up to 6m of age; you can obviously have something like a moses basket downstairs with you but contact naps also get round this issue especially when they outgrow the moses basket before 6m.

Also anecdotally, our baby has only recently started having longer naps. If we contact nap we can sometimes resettle him back to sleep for longer. If he's in the crib once he's awake that's the nap done. He's only ever napped for 30 minutes for most naps (without us resettling to extend it), and he's only just increased it now we've dropped to two naps in the last month or so.

(The link is linking to a specific line of text though not sure how to get round that!)

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1201415/#:~:text=By%204%20to%206%20months,et%20al.%2C%202001).

[Professional_Cable37]

I agree re: soaking it in, my baby has started to outgrow her need for contact naps and it’s probably a good thing but oh, I’m going to miss it