Massage can be good for your baby

Babies love massages

Touching, kissing, and hugging babies are quite instinctive for mums and dads. It’s the simplest but probably the most significant way of showing love for your child. How many times have you hugged your child to calm his fears in the middle of the night? Or soothe his nerves with kisses when he bruised his knees? Touch is comfort. Touch is love and affection. Touch means everything will turn out right.

While all these may seem sentimental, scientific studies reveal that touch can have a most profound effect on your child’s physical and emotional development.

The romance of touch begins even before the baby is born. Inside the womb, your baby rocks and sways inside the placenta. As the months go by, his world grows closer embracing him evermore. The rocking and swaying is now replaced by a stronger rhythmic motion brought on by contractions-squeezing, pushing and tickling his body all over.

For some young animals, massages are essential. Without the frequent licking of adults, their urinary tracts will not function properly. Stimulation of the skin also helps strengthen the young’s immune system. Indeed, an experiment conducted on rats revealed that those gently handled in infancy had a higher serum antibody standard.

Physically, massages act in the same way in humans as licking does in animals. Skin sensitivity is one of the earliest developed and most fundamental functions of the body. Indeed, several research studies have detected the sense of touch in human embryos less than eight weeks old. Other senses like taste and smell are linked closely to touch.

In the same way, mums who have meaningful skin contact during pregnancy tend to have an easier time during labour. They also tend to be more responsive to their babies. Touching, holding and caressing her baby helps the new mommy with her milk production. Touch stimulates the secretion of prolactin, the mothering hormone. By regularly touching her baby, she enhances her baby’s well-being and strengthens the relationship between them.

For little babies, a massage is a most luxurious sensual experience. It’s a means of maintaining the child’s health and well-being on many levels. It stimulates your baby’s skin and body, increases cardiac output, helps increase the efficiency of your baby’s respiratory and gastrointestinal functions (most relevant for babies prone to colic).

Baby massages is also a most intimate way to bond with your baby. You get to help your baby relax, stretch out, and experience all these wonderful sensory stimulation with a person she trusts and loves. You help relieve your baby’s stress points and little bits of discomfort. What’s more, massages can be a lot of fun. You can sing to her while kneading her tummy. You can tell her stories. Or you could just say her name over and over again.

Some studies have revealed that lack of early bonding between mother and child may later on give way to child abuse, neglect and failure-to-thrive syndrome. On the other hand, babies and mums who spent a great deal of quality time produced wonderful results. The mums didn’t have problems with breast-feeding and adjusted better to the tasks of motherhood. The babies displayed greater weight gains and subsequently, scored higher in IQ tests.

So, give your babies a little massage today. And she’ll have all these nice memories of warmth, comfort, security, and above all, love.