It is never too late to begin massage. Whether your baby is a newborn or several years old, massage can bring immediate and lasting results.
Benefits for parents and primary caregivers include:
- Provides all of the essential indicators of intimate parent-baby bonding and attachment: eye contact, touch, voice, smell, movement, and thermal regulation
- Encourages pre-verbal communication between caregiver and baby
- Helps parents feel more confident and competent in caring for their children
- Helps parents to ease their stress if they are a working parent and must be separated from their children for extended periods during the day
- Provides parents with one-on-one quiet time or interactive play with their children
- Creates a regular time of intimacy between parent and child
- Provides a positive way for fathers to interact more deeply with their infants/children at an early age
Benefits for infants, babies and children include the following:
- Provides a special time of communication that fosters love, compassion, and respect
- Improves general well-being
- Improves overall functioning of the gastrointestinal tract
- Promotes relaxation and helps babies self-regulate calm, which reduces crying
- Helps to normalize muscle tone
- Improves circulation
- Enhances immune system function
- Helps to improve sensory and body awareness
- Enhances neurological development
- Helps baby/child to sleep deeper and more soundly
- Helps to increase oxygen and nutrient flow to cells
- Improves respiration
- Helps with congestion, gas, and colic
- Enhances release of hormones in the body, particularly growth hormone which helps weight gain
- Reduces levels of cortisol, the stress hormone
- Massage sparks the neurons in their brains to grow and branch out to encompass other neurons
To learn more about infant massage, techniques to use, and situations when you want to avoid massage, check in at the Early Years Centre to find out when the next class will be. Massage therapists, Tessa Keefer and Kristen Loewenstein, will be teaching free infant massage classes in a casual environment open to all parents.