Genesee County Health Department

Better Life Through Better Health

Touch is crucial to a baby's health and well-being. Infant and child specialists believe that touch is essential to survival. Infant massage provides a chance to touch a baby and promote physical growth and emotional development.

• Massage enhances parent-infant bonding. It provides a way for infants and parents to communicate.
• Massage calms babies and helps them to sleep. It lowers a baby's stress hormone level, heart rate and blood pressure.
• Massage improves how well food is absorbed. Full-term babies grow faster and premature babies tend to gain weight quicker.
• Massage improves a baby's overall health status. It strengthens the immune system, improves circulation, and builds the muscle tone.
• Massage may help improve coordination, motor activity, and behavior. Developmental milestones are reached more easily.
• Massage is pleasurable for both baby and the caregiver. It helps to decrease anxiety.

Current research points to the importance of touching and physical contact between babies and their parents or caregivers. Massage done while bathing, diapering, feeding and handling a baby is exactly what studies would recommend. The pattern of close physical contact established between each parent and infant is an individual one. A baby may respond quickly to just being held while others may want cuddling. Babies communicate primarily through hand, head, arm, leg, foot, and body movement. By being in close contact with the infant, a parent can learn whether a baby's squirm is excitement or relaxation.

Get to know your baby through touch and massage. They are sure to know you love them.