Is there anything from the tradition of massage therapy that can help parents with baby sleep solutions?

Yes absolutely. There is something that really helps both parents to relax and babies to relax and that is really infant massage, and starting a daily practice or daily ritual with the baby. This has been something that has actually been practiced in India for a long, long time. Having a daily massage ritual with the baby has great benefit in improving the baby’s sleep and the baby’s ability to fall asleep.

But beyond that, skin stimulation or touch are beneficial for a myriad of different reasons. It’s great for your baby’s circulation, digestion, muscle and movement development, and of course for better sleep, not to mention giving your child an early introduction to stress management, which isn’t a bad tool to pass on. their children, considering the mounting pressures. and emphasizes that we live together on a daily basis these days. It also builds a relationship with the healthy, loving touch, so that the baby is already aware of the healthy, loving touch even before moving into childhood and adulthood. It’s really amazing, and it’s something that is done in many other cultures. In a way, it seems new to us here in North America, but many parents don’t realize that they are actually doing it regularly.

I always like to comment that the contact that already exists between parents and their babies is already good, and learning how to do infant massage through a class, workshop, or book only adds to the really good skills and contact that are already there. present. . So I want parents to know that what they are already doing is good.

When some parents say, “Oh, I don’t want to hurt my baby”, do you have any way that can reassure the parents that you won’t hurt them if you touch them lovingly? Like I’m not asking parents, “You have to massage your baby and it has to be the right pressure or else you’re going to hurt them.”

Just to elaborate a bit on maybe the amount of pressure or the amount of type of trigger point therapy that you would do with a baby. Parents are often a bit nervous about giving their babies a massage perhaps like the one they have received. So actually, sometimes I say even experiment a little bit with your own arms or your legs, or your jaws or your neck, experimenting with different pressures to see how it feels. You want to make sure you’re not doing a really feather-light touch, because feather-light touch can end up tickling and overstimulating the baby. And then you don’t want to use a really deep or aggressive touch because that can be uncomfortable. Most of the time, the baby will also give you feedback.

It’s not verbal communication, but you can often tell when the baby is squirming or not happy with the massage he’s getting. So you also have to pay attention to the baby’s signals. But ultimately the best thing to do is err on the side of caution, especially in the belly area so you don’t work too deeply, but you definitely want to involve the tissue. You don’t want to just touch the skin feather-soft and rub the skin. You want to engage the tissue and muscles, but it’s probably best to err on the side of caution and be gentle.

And I also highly recommend to parents who want to do baby massage regularly, if they want to make it a ritual, if they haven’t had massages yet, to go and get professional massage therapy. Because that will give you an idea of ​​what it feels like to receive different types of pressure and different types of techniques. And it can also give you ideas on how to work with your baby.