The Importance of Skin-To-Skin Contact with Your Baby

Independent of the weight and gestation age of the baby, if your baby’s life is not in danger, you will need to start having skin to skin contact with him or her at a very early age.

In some sub developed countries where there are very few hospital units to give care to premature babies, often times they will place more than one child in one incubator and this increases the risk of infection.

In other places where there are more technical resources, such as the developed countries, the problem that occurs is another: how to attend the needs of a great population of children, but decrease the risk of infection, at the same time that the mother and father can strengthen the contact with their son as early as possible.

Because of this, the “Kangaroo Method”, that consists in keeping an underweight baby on the mothers or fathers’ chest with very few clothes in order to allow skin-to-skin contact, so that these can turn into a source of heat, and it receives this name due to the behavior that the marsupials have with their babies, that are born before the end of their gestation.

The objective of this type of contact is that the mother learns how to have her baby close to her chest, while breastfeeding and holding the baby so that:

• Little by little and in a gradual way she will take care of the babies needs.
• Provide the food and heat the baby needs – in some sub developed countries, this has turned into an alternative to incubators.
• Avoid trauma caused by prolonged separation.

Besides breastfeeding and caring for the baby, it has been proven that skin to skin contact not only benefits the mothers, as they feel more sure about handling their newborn, but it also helps in everything referent to overcoming their own emotional prematurity.

Within the advantages of this method it is important to point out that premature babies that more have contact with skin achieve:

• A rapid breathing normalization, meaning, they also register less amount of apnea.
• They suck at a more constant rhythm and stay calm for a longer amount of time; this last point is due to the rhythmic slight movement of the mothers breathing.
• They control their body temperature better since they are placed up against the mother’s heart and surrounded in an ideal atmosphere with the correct temperature and the sounds of the mother’s heart. Although you will still need to wrap the baby in blankets if the baby is very premature, or if it is the baby’s first walk out into the exterior world.
• They remain alert for more time.
• They step out of the inadequate stimulus of the incubator, such as the sounds and vibration of the motor, continual exposure to the light and the movements they do over the hard surface.
• They cry less.