Infant Massage & Stress
“Infant massage is one tool we have to help reshape our child’s interpretations of the world, to release her pain, grief, and fear, and to open her up to love and joy."
- Vimala McClure
Stress
Stress can affect children even in the earliest months of life and throughout early childhood.
Stressors can come from hospitalization, pain from medical conditions, parental stress (preoccupied or angry faces/reactions, rough handling), big changes to routine, over-stimulation, not attending to their needs (such as not feeding when hungry or lack of attention), societal stress, extreme cases such as physical abuse or neglect, and more.
Nurturing touch can be an important tool to help combat stress. Research has demonstrated that high levels of early physical contact and maternal responsiveness can even mitigate genetic predisposition for more extreme stress reactions. (1)
How Infant Massage Can Help
Infant massage has shown to help reduce stress and promote relaxation and bonding in both parents and babies.
Nurturing parenting skills (including nurturing touch, understanding cues and parental confidence) can have a lasting impact.
“Preterm infants receiving massage therapy showed fewer stress behaviors and less activity from the first to the last day of the study. The findings suggest that massage has pacifying or stress reducing effects on preterm infants, which is noteworthy given that they experience numerous stressors during their hospitalization.” (2)
“Infant massage facilitates parent-infant bonding and the development of warm, positive relationships, reduces stress responses to painful procedures (e.g. inoculations), reduces pain associated with teething and constipation, reduces colic, helps induce sleep, and effects positive feelings on parents while they are massaging their infants” (3)
“Suggested that infant massage increased drowsiness and quiet sleep, reduced infants’ latency [delay] to sleep, increased infants’ vocalizations, reduced restlessness, improved mother’s play behavior (became more age-appropriate) and mother’s perception of their infant’s temperament, and reduced infants’ fussiness after the 2-week period” (3)
Ensuring parents are being mindful of stress levels in front of the child and managing stress in other ways can also be helpful.
This might include things like leaning on or building a support network, physical exercise, meditation or breathing exercises, incorporating cultural traditions at home, connecting with your spirituality, counseling or one of many other healthy ways to manage stress.
H. Anisman et al., "Do early-life events permanently alter behavioral and hormonal responses to stressors?" Int J Dev Neurosci 16, no. 3-4 (Jun-Jul 1998): 149-64.
Hernandez-Reif M, Diego M, Field T. Preterm infants show reduced stress behaviors and activity after 5 days of massage therapy. Infant Behav Dev. 2007;30(4):557‐561. doi:10.1016/j.infbeh.2007.04.002
Galanakis, Michael & Ntaouti, Eleftheria & Tsitsanis, Georgios & Chrousos, George. (2015). The Effects of Infant Massage on Maternal Distress: A Systematic Review. Psychology. 06. 2091-2097. 10.4236/psych.2015.616204.