Photo Credit: David Castillo Dominici at www.freedigitalphotos.net

A new study proves that cuddling preemie babies produces long-term benefits. The study falls into the category of “things parents already know,” as did the study that proved caregivers raising kids with special needs experience stress featured on Different Dream not too long ago.

Long-Term Study about Cuddling Preemie Babies

An article on the Time website describes the study Ruth Feldman began in 1996, before the benefits of kangaroo care (KC) in NICU were well understood. According to the article,

Feldman assembled two sample groups of 73 preemie babies each at two different Israeli hospitals. One group got standard treatment, which meant no KC; at the other, the mothers would hold their preemies for one hour per day for 14 days…Then they followed all the babies, examining them when they were 3, 6, 12 and 24 months old, and again when they were 5 and 10 years old.

Benefits of Cuddling Preemie Babies

Feldman and her team discovered several ways the KC group outperformed the other group:

• As babies, their sleep patterns were more organized or predictable.
• The babies had steadier respiration and heart rates.
• As babies, they were better able to direct their gaze and actions toward a goal.
• The above benefits were in evidence a decade later.
• As 10-year-olds, those who had gotten KC were better at stress management.

Other Interesting Tidbits

Two other tidbits from the study deserve mention. First, Feldman hopes to follow her sample group at least until they turn 17. Then she wants to scan their brains to see if lasting effects of the cuddling can still be detected. Second, it only took 14 total hours of KC over 14 days–to produce lasting and profound effects. To learn why Feldman thinks a little cuddling accomplishes so much, check out the entire article, How Cuddling Saves Tiny Babies. Finally, though the subjects of the study were preemies, every baby needs to be cuddled, too.

Did You Cuddle Your Preemie?

Was your baby in NICU? Were you encouraged to cuddle your baby? Leave a comment about how you think affected your little one. I’ll start. KC wasn’t on the radar screen when our newborn was in NICU in 1982. But instinctively, my husband spent hours and hours beside the isolette rubbing our son’s tiny cheek. Into his teen years, whenever our boy was stressed, he would say, “Mom, Dad, would you rub my cheek?”

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