Recent Events

Baby’s First Massage at The New York Zero to Three Network’s Annual Spring Conference

Recently, I was invited to present information and demonstrate Baby’s’ First Massage to practitioners attending the New York Zero to Three Network Conference. The conference held at New York Universities Kimmel Center focused on “The Mind-Body Connection” in the World of the Young Child: From Development to Intervention”. This conference provided an excellent opportunity for practitioners across numerous fields working with young children and their families to see and hear firsthand how infant massage benefits babies and gives parents a special way to communicate and interact with their newborn.

Practitioners from diverse fields such as mental health, child care, health care, art therapies, social services and education learned how to interrupt baby’s cries, understand time out signals, and practice the gently calming massage strokes that helps baby with digestion, elimination, weight gain, and restore deeper more peaceful sleep.

I encourage all who are interested in better understanding this age group to click on this link to learn more about the Zero to Three Network.

American Massage Therapy Association (AMTA) Position Paper on Infant Massage

The AMTA recently released the following Position Statement on the benefits of Infant Massage.

It is the position of the American Massage Therapy Association (AMTA) that newborns (especially pre-term infants) may benefit from massage therapy.

AMTA Position Statement Proposal

Background information

Research has shown that neonatal handling affects the neurochemical brain development of certain regions in the brain that regulate the response to stress7. The benefits of massage therapy for pre-term infants have been well documented in several studies; some of the cited research involves small sample sizes, taken together, however, the total research cited is supportive. These benefits include the following:

• Massage is a cost-effective therapy for pre-term infants.
• Pre-term infants gained more weight with just five days of massage.
• Massage therapy by mothers in the perinatal period serves as a strong time cue, enhancing coordination of the developing circadian system with environmental cues.
• Over the 6-week period, the massage therapy infants gained more weight, showed greater improvement on emotionality, sociability, and soothability temperament dimensions and had greater decreases in urinary stress catecholamines/hormones (norepinephrine, epinephrine, cortisol).
• Infants receiving massage showed fewer sleep delay behaviors and had a shorter latency to sleep onset by the end of the study.
• Massage may have a stress reducing effect on pre-term infants in the NICU.
• Reduction of illness and diarrheal episodes in orphaned children in Ecuador.
• Improve quality of sleep and reduce sleep-disordered breathing in Low Birth Weight babies.

The AMTA Journal, "MTJ" Winter, 2006 issue has a fine article on infant massage. Baby's First Massage® is included in the article! It's a well written, informative article. Enjoy! Read/download here.

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