Benefits for your child
- Increases self esteem for child and parent
- Promotes bonding and attachment
- Increases sense of love, acceptance, respect, and trust
- For baby, improves body awareness
- Improves relaxation and release of stress
- Stimulates circulation
- Strengthens digestive circulatory, and gastrointestinal systems, which can lead to better weight gain
- Reduces discomfort due to teething, colic, gas, congestion
- Increases elimination, circulation, respiration
- Improves hormonal activity
- Improves synchrony between child and care giver
- For parents, it improves their ability to react to infant cues
- Increases confidence in parenting skills
- Provides time to share and quality time together
- Improves sense of well-being for parent, reduces stress and blood pressure and improves overall health
Five aspects of early development influenced by touch
Communication:
Engages pre-speech components and emerging speech (direct eye gaze, listening, turn taking, etc.)
Motor:
Improves muscles tone coordination and increases body awareness
Socialization:
Infant and Caregiver engage one another, infant usually in the quiet alert state
Self-Help:
May stimulate oral motor musculature awareness, lip closure relaxation of tension needed for swallowing, etc.
Cognition:
Overall awareness of self and body boundaries, cause and effect, and increase attention span.
Reasons NOT to Perform Massage
- Fever in child/infant
- Ear infection in child/infant
- Jaundice in infant
- Influenza
- Severe respiratory infections or colds.
- Tuberculosis
- Cardiac Conditions
- Edema, abnormal amount of fluid in body
- Recent surgery. Always get physicians approval.
*** Done carefully massage is generally a safe and comforting technique. The experience offers many positive benefits to both the parent and the child.
*** To prevent transmitting disease to and from child, always wash your hands thoroughly before and after the massage.