Eight Ways that Massage Benefits Your Baby
June 14th, 2011
Baby massage is no longer just considered a useful technique for relaxing a baby. While baby massage can often achieve this end, massage is increasingly recognised for a range of benefits for babies.
The techniques of baby massage should be acquired with the proper guidance of a qualified professional. The benefits of gaining these skills for parents and babies are enormous. Here we take a look at eight key benefits.
- Baby massage has been proven to help establish, strengthen and maintain the bonds between parent and child. As one of the few practices that incorporates all of the elements that are critical to the formation and maintenance of bonds between parents and children, massage stimulates the baby’s senses through sensitive touch, eye contact, the familiar and comforting smell that you give off, the sound of your voice and the focus and consistency of your response.
- Baby massage helps to foster your child’s neurological and emotional development. The communication that occurs between you and your baby – through touch, talk and gaze – has been shown to support the development of connections between nerve cells in the brain of the baby that are critical for thinking, feeling and learning.
- One of the most important senses, touch is an essential ingredient for your baby’s development. Many people do not realise that a baby’s sense of touch is the first of its senses to develop and this occurs early in the pregnancy. Touch continues to be important throughout the life of a human. Not only does it stimulate growth hormones and the production of hormones that relieve stress, it also stimulates the hormones that are conducive to bonding and development.
- Anecdotally and as has been shown through some studies, learning correct baby massage techniques and devoting time to carefully massaging your baby with a firm but gentle pressure can assist your baby to be calm, happy and content. As you massage your baby, endorphins (the feel good hormones) are released and the effects of hormones such as cortisol (a stress hormone) are reduced. This can have a positive effect of the brain development of infants.
- Increasingly, evidence shows that when high levels of stress hormones are present, this can be harmful to babies’ brains and can have a long standing impact on the way that a child interprets and responds to stressful and difficult circumstances. While it can be inappropriate to generalise results, some studies also show that babies that have lower levels of cortisol in their blood are more successful at mental and motor ability tests than their counterparts with higher levels of cortisol.
- It has been shown that baby massage can help your baby into a deeper and more restorative level of sleep. Some researchers have even found that baby massage before bed can have a more profound effect on helping a baby to fall asleep and stay asleep than rocking. Other studies show that babies who have regular massages sleep better, cry less and have lower levels of stress hormones. Acquiring baby massage skills from a qualified professional can have far-reaching effects for both parents and children
- The benefits of touch for pre-term and premature babies are quite widely known. Some research has shown that premature babies who received massage gained significantly more weight more quickly and were discharged from hospital sooner than babies in a control group. Further to this, the massage seems to have enduring positive effects for growth and development. Particularly for premature babies, massage can help to strengthen bonds between parents and children and support parents to feel more confident in caring for their baby.
- With many benefits for children, baby massage also has positive effects for parents. Some studies have shown that mothers afflicted with postnatal depression show significant improvement when baby massage is included in their baby’s daily routine. For Dads, studies where babies were massaged by their fathers have shown that the baby’s rewarded their fathers with more eye contact, smiling, vocalising and touch than babies in a control group who were not massaged by their fathers.
Baby massage is important and delivers benefits for babies and their parents on a variety of levels. While these benefits are usually thought to relate predominantly to the physical development and well-being of the baby, a growing body of evidence is showing that baby massage has positive psychological and emotional effects for babies and children. Enrolling in a baby massage program will ensure you gain the techniques needed to safely and effectively perform massage on your little one.