Daily skin-to-skin contact in weeks after birth linked to less crying and better sleep

By Emma Young Few things are as stressful as listening to your baby crying — and excessive crying is clearly not good for the baby, either. Skin-to-skin contact is widely used in the first hours after a birth, with benefits for infants and parents. But, according to a new paper in Developmental Psychology, a daily hour of skin-to-skin contact for weeks afterwards is beneficial, too: it reduces crying and improves sleep. Kelly Cooijmans at Radboud University, in the Netherlands, and her colleagues recruited Dutch healthy first-time mothers with full-term infants for their randomized controlled trial. On signing up while pregnant, the women knew they were taking part in a trial aimed at improving infant crying and sleep, but not what the intervention would be. Prolonged mother-infant skin-to-skin contact is not part of Dutch culture, the team notes. So when one group was instructed to perform “care as usual”, extended skin-to-skin contact took place only immediately after birth. The other group was asked to ensure that their baby had an hour a day of this contact for five weeks. The mothers were also asked to report on a range of measures, including how long their infant cried and slept, for the first 12 weeks of their baby’s life. (As women in the Netherlands get 12 weeks of paid maternity leave, the team felt that this would all be practically feasible.) Only relatively few women — 16 of an initial 64 in the daily contact group — did actu...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Babies Sleep and dreaming Source Type: blogs