Caring For Your Baby’s Bodily Needs – Part Five

The high-maintenance stage of the first two years is often tedious, Caring For Your Baby’s Bodily Needs – Part Five Articles sometimes fun, but it’s also a chance to get to know your baby. In this article you will find practical ways to take good care of your baby — and enjoy it.The Right Touch: The Art Of Infant 강북출장마사지one of life’s simple pleasures (massage has long been enjoyed by adults), and research is showing that babies grow better and act better when they are on the receiving end of the right touch. Infant massage is a skin-to-skin connection that helps parents and baby better read each other’s body language — without saying a word.

Besides the fact that it is just plain fun to touch your baby, infant massage helps babies grow and develop better. Other cultures highly value touch to help babies grow. In some Eastern societies a mother is expected to give her baby a daily massage. One of the most exciting areas of research is the connection between touch and growth. Touched babies thrive and here’s why.

Touch stimulates growth-promoting substances.
Health care providers have long known that babies who are touched a lot grow better, and now there is search to back up this observation. There seems to be a biological connection between stroking, massaging, and grooming infants and their growth. Touch stimulates growth-promoting hormones and increases the enzymes that make the cells of the vital organs more responsive to the growth-promoting effects of these hormones. For example, premature infants in a “grower nursery,” where they can gain needed weight, showed 47 percent more weight gain when they received extra touch.

Animal researchers have recognized the connection between a mother animal’s licking her offspring and how well her babies grow. When new born pups were deprived their mothers’ frequent licking (equivalent to in massage), the level of growth hormone decreased, and the pups stopped growing. Even injecting growth hormone into the untouched pups would not cause them to grow. Only when the mother animal’s touching and licking were restarted did the pups resume their growth.

Researchers have found that human babies, too, when deprived of touch showed decreased growth hormone and developed a condition called psychosocial dwarfism; even more amazingly they also did not grow when given injections of growth hormone. Only when given human touch did these infants grow. This finding implies that touch causes something beneficial to occur at the cellular level that makes the cells respond to growth hormone. Yes, there is something, magical about a parent’s touch.

Touch promotes brain growth.
Not only is touch good for the body, it’s good for the mind. Studies show that newborns receiving extra touch display enhanced neurological development. Why this smart connection? Researchers believe that touch promotes the growth of myelin, the insulating material around nerves that makes nerve impulses travel faster.

Touch improves digestion.
Babies receiving extra touch show enhanced secretion of digestive hormones. Researchers believe that this is another reason that touched infants grow better. It seems that touch makes the babies’ digestive system more efficient. Babies with colic caused by the irritable colon syndrome may have less trouble in the colon when massaged frequently.

Touch improves behavior.
Research shows babies receiving extra touch become better organized. They sleep better at night, fuss less during the day, and relate better to caregivers’ interactions. Touch settles babies. Massage can be a wonderful tool for helping baby to got sleep at night.

Touch promotes baby’s self-esteem.
Being on the receiving end of loving hands helps babies develop a feel for their body parts by learning which areas of the body are most sensitive and which need relaxing. Being touched gives value to a person, like an adult feeling “touched” by the remarks of a friend.

Touch helps parents.
A daily massage helps you to get in touch with your whole baby, to read her body language, and to learn her cues. Giving your baby the right touch is just one more step up the ladder of learning about your baby. Infant massage is especially valuable for the parent and infant who had a slow start — for example, when separated by a medical complication. Massage helps parent and baby reconnect. For the slow-start mother who doesn’t feel naturally “motherly” toward her newborn, massage is the extra spark to ignite the fire. Likewise for the slow-to-warm-up baby, massage helps break down the barrier so that the uncuddly baby gets to like being handled — the parents get used to handling their baby.

Several employed mothers use an evening infant massage as a tool to help them reconnect with their baby after being away for the day. This special touch enables them to tune in to baby and tune out their work as they reenter home life.

For dads who are novices at caring for babies, massage is a hands-on course in baby handling. Also, it’s important for baby to get used to dad’s touch as well as mom’s. Babies thrive on different strokes.

Special touches for special babies.
Handicapped infants — and their parents — particularly benefit from infant massage. Studies show that massage helps motor-impaired infants better communicate their needs to the parents — a process called social cueing. Massage puts you in touch with you infant’s body signals.

Learning the Right Touch

Massage is a touch you do with your baby, not to your baby. It’s an interaction, not a task. You learn which strokes your baby enjoys and an, as if dancing, go with the flow of your baby’s body language. While it is nearly impossible to rub your baby the wrong way, there’s how to learn the right touch for your baby.

Get Ready

Choose a warm, quiet, draft-free place. Do this ritual wherever you and baby are comfortable: on the floor, a padded table, grass, beach, or bed. Put on soothing music. Infant-massage instructors are a good reference source for music to massage by.

Choose a time when you are not in a hurry, not likely to be interrupted, and baby is most in need of relaxing. Some parents like to start the day off with a morning massage. Some prefer a before-nap massage. Babies with evening colic are best massaged toward late afternoon or early evening before the “happy hour” of colic begins. Sometimes a late-afternoon massage can prompt the colicky infant to forget his evening blast.

Choose the right massage oil. Infant-massage instructors and their selective infant clientele prefer fruit or vegetable oil (“edible oils”), vitamin E enriched and unscented. Look for “cold pressed” on the label, which means the oil has been extracted only by the use of pressure, not by heat or chemical solvents, which change the characteristics of the oil. Avoid oils made from a petroleum base. Massage oils that have stood the test of time are coconut, almond, apricot, safflower, and avocado oils. Watch for possible skin allergy rash to occur within an hour, especially to nut oils.