Neurodevelopmental Care includes: Recognizing Baby’s Signs of Stability and Stress
When a premature or medically fragile newborn is placed in our hands, we provide information for the parent about their baby’s daily care as well as opportunities to interact and bond with the baby.
The NICU is a medically-complex environment with highly technical equipment. This lifesaving equipment is crucial in caring for babies, but it may also cause parents to feel isolated from their infant. Our neurodevelopmental program in the NICU helps parents learn to read their baby’s behaviors:
- When the baby is stressed and needs to rest.
- When the baby is ready to bond with the parent.
- What type of interaction the baby can handle.
Babies in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit can appear so fragile that many parents are hesitant to touch and hold their baby. The NICU’s highly-skilled developmental specialists guide parents on how to touch, hold, massage, and bathe their baby—using their infant’s signs of readiness as a guide. The specialists help parents gain confidence in caring for their infant by promoting bonding.
Our neurodevelopmental care program helps parents provide a pleasurable positive touch experience or their baby using their hands to gently support the baby in comforting ways.
Early Touch and Hand Containment
In the earliest stages of a baby’s illness, parents often feel hesitant to touch their infant for fear of causing discomfort or disrupting the baby’s care. Touch is necessary to the parent-infant interaction and to the development of attachment.
A medically-fragile newborn baby is comforted when a parent places his or her hands around the baby, reproducing the familiar containment felt in the womb. Parents are guided on how to touch and support their baby as they provide boundaries with their hands to contain their baby’s body, arms, and leg movements. A firm surrounding touch is more comforting than lightly stroking the baby’s sensitive skin.
Skin-to-skin holding (kangaroo care) can help stabilize the baby’s heart rate and breathing pattern, and is comforting to both the parent and the baby.
Skin-to-Skin Holding or Kangaroo Care
Skin-to-skin holding is also known as kangaroo care because the baby looks like he or she is tucked into a pouch on the parent’s chest. The parent will sit in a rocker with the baby placed against his or her bare chest with a shirt or a blanket covering both the baby and parent.
The parent will be able to feel the baby’s movements against his or her skin, and the baby will hear the parent’s heartbeat and find comfort in the skin-to-skin contact.
Skin-to-skin holding provides neurodevelopmental benefits for the developing brain, brings tranquility for the parent and baby, and promotes attachment between the two. Additionally, kangaroo care aids in milk production for mothers who are trying to produce breast milk.
Infant Massage
Research shows that babies who receive massages sleep better and feed more successfully. The goal of infant massage is relaxation and comfort for the infant. Premature infants who receive infant massage may feed better, sleep more, and have greater weight gain. Parents say massaging their baby helps them feel more bonded to their baby.
Parents are taught how to massage their medically-fragile infant, beginning with massaging the baby’s leg, foot, or hand.
Many parents see and feel the relaxation in their baby. The experience of mutual enjoyment and closeness promotes the feeling of attachment.
Swaddled Bathing
Swaddled bathing is very relaxing and calming for the baby and increases the parent’s confidence in handling the baby.
Swaddled bathing is a calming, comforting, neurodevelopmentally-supportive method of bathing a medically fragile infant. Supported by the Infant Development Specialist or bedside nurse, the parent bathes the baby who is comfortably swaddled in a cloth that supports a flexed, tucked position during the bathing.
The baby is gradually unwrapped from the supportive swaddle cloth during the bathing, relaxing into the warm bath and experiencing the comforts similar to being in the uterus. This bathing process has neurodevelopmental benefits for the smallest of premature infants to most the medically fragile babies.
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Newborn Bathing
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