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Touch and Massage Your baby needs touch. It’s one of nature’s most powerful recipes for growth, contentment, bonding and pleasure, it helps him breathe well, sleep well, digest optimally, feed successfully, dream peacefully and grow strong with a feeling of love and security. So before you wrap your baby in babygros, swaddling blankets and woolly jackets, think – would it be nicer for your baby and for you if you were snuggled together, skin to skin? Touch is a great regulator. When your baby is in contact with you, skin to skin, her breathing stabilizes, as does her heart rate and digestion and excretion work optimally, her sleep is restful. On a babiesknow course we'll look in depth at the science that drives us to touch one another, and how vital it is for the functioning of all your babies body systems, and for his development. We'll introduce you to kangaroo mother care, a system developed by Nils Bergman, that enables you and your baby to be in touch while you go about all your daily activities. And we'll guide you through some simple massage techniques. Lack of touch can kill - chilling tales Frederick II, a thirteenth century Holy Roman emperor and king of southern Italy unwittingly conducted the first study of human bonding and the importance of touch. He spoke several languages and wanted to discover the inborn language of mankind by raising a group of children who would never hear speech. The children were cared for by foster mothers and nurses who were allowed to suckle and bathe the children but not to interact with them at any other time. All the babies died before uttering a single word. Seven hundred years later, a similar tragic fate befell another group of babies. In the 1940s, when the theory of disease being spread by contact was novel, psychoanalyst Rene Spitz gathered a group of babies from orphanages and those separated from their mothers who were in prison, to conduct an experiment to see whether reduced human contact could reduce the incidence of disease. The babies were fed and clothed, and kept warm and clean but they were not played with, handled, or held. Spitz thought that human contact would risk exposing the children to hazardous infectious organisms. But what happened was that while the physical needs of the children were met, they became withdrawn and sickly, and lost weight. A great many died. In tragic irony, the babies exhibited a vast number of infections .. in one institituion the mortality rate to measles was 40% compared to the national average was 0.5% … and in the cleanest and most sterile institutions the death rate was above 75%. Spitz had rediscovered that a lack of human contact and interaction is fatal to infants. We need touch, just as we need love. Massage for your baby begins in the womb and continues each time you hold or stroke her. You can massage your baby while she lies on your chest, and as she grows you and she may enjoy an evolving routine of soothing and developmental massage techniques. You can learn some techniques on a baby massage course.The doyen of baby massage, Peter Walker, who has inspired us and joined some of the babiesknow courses, has more at www.thebabyswebsite.com. All contents copyright © Babiesknow, 2008. All rights reserved. |
‘Touch is food to our babies. I wish that every baby was able to be held, skin to skin, by their mum immediately after birth. And then that touch and massage became as much a part of life as food.'
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