Why You Should Learn Infant Massage
Bringing home a new baby involves a lot of on-the-job training. Learning how your baby likes to be soothed, learning how to build new family routines, learning how to breastfeed, learning how to sleep with a surprisingly noisy new roommate - the list could go on and on!
New parents have an amazing ability to learn and adapt to their baby’s growing needs, and adding the skill of infant massage can bring many benefits to your parenting toolkit.
Parents who practice infant massage report better sleep for the entire family, feeling their babies are more content overall, and fewer spells of crying and fussiness
The Benefits of Infant Massage
The benefits of practicing infant massage are broken down into four main categories: interaction, relaxation, stimulation, and relief.
Interaction:
Infant massage provides a hands-on way for you to bond with your baby. Massage releases oxytocin (that amazing “love hormone”) and creates positive moments of connection between you and your baby, which can be especially helpful during the stressful newborn days.
Learning the skill of infant massage also helps new parents feel more confident about their abilities to sooth their baby and cope with the challenges of life with a baby.
Positive touch is also a form of non-verbal communication that strengthens connection to help to facilitate secure parent-baby attachment.
Relaxation:
Massage is soothing in many ways. It can lower stress hormones for both babies and their caregivers, and can help infants regulate their nervous systems.
Parents report that their babies fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer if infant massage is added to the bedtime routine. Some research also shows it can help reduce night wakings—which improves parents sleep quality as well!
Stimulation:
The positive physical stimulation of infant massage has been shown help improve muscle tone, brain development, and overall growth. It encourages flexibility in the limbs that can improve mobility.
It can can sooth upset tummies by encouraging bowl movements, helping babies pass gas, and preventing constipation.
Relief:
Infant massage can improve fussiness and colic symptoms, providing relief to the tension that builds when babies are difficult to soothe.
It can also relieve pain after standard procedures like vaccine injections and heel sticks, and soothe discomforts that come with babies’ fast patterns of growth.
When to Start Infant Massage
Babies are born with a highly developed sense of touch, and love to be soothed by close, skin-to-skin contact with their caregivers. This means that practicing massage with your baby can start any time after birth, and is beneficial for the entire infant period - and even beyond!
Learn Infant Massage at Andaluz
Andaluz has a new Infant Massage class offering open to the community!
This class is a four week series taught by Tia Rich, CPM, LMT, CLC. Tia is a Craniosacral and Infant Massage Specialist.
The class will focus on teaching new parents the skill of infant massage in a supportive group setting.
Our first class series beings this April!
