The massage to your baby is a great way to show love and go to strengthen the bond with him from the beginning. Let’s look at the benefits of infant massage on welfare, both baby and parents.
In principle, it is worth noting that when practicing a massage to the little one are maintaining several important factors for the bonding such as eye contact, mutual smiles, effective words and soft sounds, loving touches and caresses, odors and produces a very fruitful mutual interaction.
These interactions increase the biochemical pleasure in the child’s brain, thus reinforcing the neural pathways associated with pleasure and motivation.
Massage benefits for the baby
- It allows to maintain a loving and intimate communication.
- It improves the bond of the baby with his parents.
- It promotes social, emotional and cognitive development.
- It helps the little one to relax and release the stress of daily stimuli.
- Reduces intestinal gas and colic.
- It promotes better rest and sleep.
- Reinforces and regulates the respiratory, circulatory, nervous, muscular, digestive and endocrine systems.
Related: How to create a baby sleep routine
Massage benefits for Parents
- It allows them to know more about the baby and to understand their signals better.
- It improves communication and emotional bonds.
- It increases their confidence in their treatment and manipulation with the baby.
- Increases vocalization and direct eye contact.
- It helps them also to relax and to rest better.
- It allows them to keep a special time to connect and strengthen the bond with their child.
Massaging babies is an excellent form of tactile stimulation, which is also of great benefit in premature babies: a study found that premature babies stimulated with a daily massage had an average increase in weight greater than 47 percent per day, who were more active and alert during the sleep-wake cycle, while showing more motor maturity, better space-time orientation, and better behavior on the Brazelton scale that babies who did not receive massage.
The baby massage strengthens the bond with their parents. It has even been shown that in situations in which both parents work, daily massage helps to compensate for the separation, in order to re-establish the bond between them and thus provide the intimate quality of time, so necessary in this initial life stage of a human being.