Infants love massage!
Touch is the beginning of communication between a mother and her child. It helps a child feel loved and secure, and helps develop a sense of trust. Physical bonding between a mother and her infant is critically important not only for the child’s physical, emotional, and mental development, but for the mother’s as well. Cuddling, rocking, and breastfeeding are excellent ways for such bonding to occur, and so is infant massage.
Benefits of infant massage
According to Tammy Roecker of Phoenix, who is a certified perinatal massage therapist and medical massage therapist, there are many benefits of infant massage for both child and mother—and dads too. Some of them include:
• Relaxes both child and mother
• Promotes bonding and attachment between mother and child, including eye-to-eye contact and skin-to-skin contact
• Facilitates weight gain in premature infants
• Reduces stress hormone levels
• Reduces pain
• Improves muscle tone
• Helps the infant (and the mother!) sleep
• Relieves constipation, colic, and gas
Learn about infant massage
Mothers, fathers, grandparents, and even older siblings can learn infant massage. You can learn more about infant massage from the Touch Research Institute, which has many abstracts of studies on its website. If you want to participate in or learn how to do infant massage, you can contact any of the following facilities in the greater Phoenix/Tucson area:
You may also want to read:
“Therapeutic touch improves health of premature infants”
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