Use Nurturing Touch

The Eight Principles : Use Nurturing Touch

Babies are born with urgent and intense needs and depend completely on others to meet them. Nurturing touch helps meet a baby's need for physical contact, affection, security, stimulation and movement. Parents who choose a nurturing approach to physical interactions with their children promote development of healthy attachments. Even as children get older their need to stay connected through touch remains strong.

Needs and the Benefits of Nurturing Touch

For the child, nurturing touch stimulates growth-promoting hormones, improves intellectual and motor development, and helps regulate babies' temperature, heart rate, and sleep/wake patterns.

Babies who receive nurturing touch gain weight faster, nurse better, cry less, are calmer, and have better intellectual and motor development

Cultures high in physical affection, touch, holding or carrying, rate low in adult physical violence

How to Provide Nurturing Touch

Skin-to-skin contact is especially effective

Breastfeeding and joint baths offer opportunities to snuggle skin-to-skin

Massage can soothe babies with colic, help a child unwind before bedtime, and provides opportunity for playful interactions

Carrying, or babywearing using a soft carrier, meets a baby's need for physical contact, comfort, security, stimulation and movement, all of which encourage neurological development

Be conscious to avoid the overuse of devices designed to hold a baby independently, such as swings, jumpers, plastic carriers, and strollers

Nurturing Touch and the Older Child

Frequent hugs, snuggling, back rubs and massage all meet the older child’s need for touch, as do more physical play such as wrestling and tickling

Wrestling and tickling should follow the lead of the child and should not be forced

Use playfulness and games to encourage physical closeness

If you find your child is too heavy to hold comfortably, provide the closeness that carrying provides by providing attention or comfort in your lap

All humans (including adults) thrive on touch and the reconnection it provides

Attachment Parenting : The Eight Principles

An Over-The-Shoulder-Baby-Holder
in use on a hike.