Massage is for Infants, too!
Westerners are just beginning to know what people in Eastern countries have known for centuries – that babies do well when they get massage. People living in places like Eastern Europe, Africa and even Latin America routinely massage their infants. In fact, mothers in India have been giving their newborn children massages for over 3,000 years.
It’s only been in last 30 years or so that massage has been catching on in some sectors of Western society. Parents are learning that massage can have a calming effect on their baby and it doesn’t make any difference if the child was born prematurely or carried to full term.
One recent study points to the positive effect massage can have on preterm infants over the course of only 5 days. During this study, children received a total of 15 massages delivered from Monday to Friday. The 15-minute massages were administered on a regular schedule of 9 am, 11 am and 1 pm on consecutive days. Licensed massage therapists were specially trained in a specific procedure to use on the children.
The study concluded that even after such limited exposure of only 5 days, preterm infants showed fewer stress behaviors from the first to the last day, the researchers said.
Parents who are interested in massage can easily learn some techniques which could be beneficial to a child. There are books on the subject and classes available in some areas to teach a parent to quickly and easily help their infant. Here are a few techniques that a parent could learn:
- Face – Muscles used for sucking can easily be soothed by using the thumbs to stroke across the upper lip, then the lower lip and toward the checks like creating a smile.
- Stomach – Start with both hands at the center of the baby’s chest. Push out to the sides and follow the rib cage, sort of like smoothing out the pages of a book. Keep your hands on the baby and bring them back to center, sort of like drawing a heart-shaped motion.
- Legs – Grab and hold the top of the baby’s thigh with one hand. With the other hand, start at the baby’s foot and begin stroking from the heel to the buttock, squeezing regularly like in a “milking” motion.
One word of caution regarding the amount of pressure: Too little pressure will tickle the baby, and too much could cause pain. Use your judgment on this. Watch for the baby’s response. Do it right and you will help the child by reducing their stress and adding comfort to their lives. Colic can be eased, gas reduced and constipation relieved, too. This is just one additional good thing that has come to our part of the world from the long experience of Eastern Cultures.