Category Archives: Babywearing

Colic: Remedies the Lazy Way

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Crying baby

Inconsolable baby. Frazzled parent. Colic can be an overwhelming time for families. There are not only remedies for colic but ways of lessening the crying associated with colic through babywearing.

If I hadn’t witnessed colic in a friend’s baby and seen the devastating effect it had on her family, I wouldn’t begin to understand. I would just think that colic meant crying, but it goes far beyond that.

Colic occurs in about 25% of infants. “Colic” is the blanket term that describes the symptoms more than the causes, which are not always clear. From a few weeks old to 3-4 months old, some babies cry because they are in pain. They cry themselves into another world where they aren’t aware of their immediate surroundings. They are in pain, most often assumed to be digestive pain. This may be caused by food allergies or sensitivities, by reflux, or by other health issues. Colicky babies are in distress. Their cries are piercing and incredibly difficult for parents to handle day after day.


Colic Remedies

For more than a century, it has been common to give infants gripe water, a home remedy for colic that included alcohol, bicarbonate, and herbs that soothe digestion.

Motion and pressure can help—either the motion of bouncing, motion that gently manipulates the area of the pain, or gentle downward pressure of being carrying with weight on the belly—but carrying or physical soothing that starts after the crying has begun does not necessarily help. Babies are often unresponsive to these efforts.

Parents should definitely track what the baby or mother eats, note any changes, and cut out anything that they associate with periods of crying. There are other steps that can reduce crying. Rather than dealing with the symptoms once a baby is in pain, parents can take steps to prevent some amount of the pain their baby is feeling.


Research on Babywearing and Colic

Research has shown that babies who are carried more throughout the day cry 54% less during the evening hours when colic tends to peak. “The relative lack of carrying in our society,” wrote study authors, Drs Hunziker and Barr, “may predispose to crying and colic in normal infants.” They looked not only at carrying in response to a baby’s crying but to “supplemental carrying” during the day. Carrying during the day even when the baby was not crying reduced overall crying by 43%.

Although constant carrying is unlikely to become the typical infant care-taking practice in our society, we hypothesized that the “normal” crying pattern might be changed by supplemental carrying, that is, increased carrying throughout the day in addition to that which occurs during feeding. If so, such carrying might have anticipator.- soothing effectiveness in normal infants and therapeutic or preventative value in relation to infant “colic.” Urs A. Hunziker, MD, and Ronald G. Barr, MDCM, FRCP(C), Pediatrics (1986).

I think of babywearing as the lazy colic remedy because it takes so little effort to carry a baby more during the day to reduce their distress, or reduce the amount of time most babies are in distress, in the evening when most crying occurs.


Babywearing Benefits

In addition to other benefits of babywearing, the closeness of baby and parent can be soothing for babies before they get to the point that they can’t be calmed. Babywearing allows a baby to be comforted by people rather than by things. Babywearing is less about the baby carrier and more about the relationship that this tool enables. With the help of a baby carrier, your arms are your baby’s safe haven away from the stimulation of the world.

Your baby feels secure and calm near you, physical closeness helps a baby regulate her systems, and this closeness helps lessen the symptoms of colic.


References

Hunziker UA, Barr RG. Increased carrying reduces infant crying: A randomized controlled trial. Pediatrics 77:641-648 (1986).

Barr RG, McMullan SJ, Spiess H, Leduc DG, Yaremko J, Barfield R, Francoeur TE, Hunziker UA. Carrying as colic “therapy”: a randomized controlled trial. Pediatrics 87(5):623-30 (May 1991).

Image © Vladimir Mucibabic | Dreamstime.com

What Is Kangaroo Care?

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Kangaroo Care of Newborn Baby

Kangaroo care of infants involves a parent, usually the mother, holding the baby skin-to-skin on her bare chest. The steady warmth, easy access to breastfeeding, and simple, physical closeness benefit parent and baby.

All babies benefit from closeness to a parent, and premature babies need the most help.


Kangaroo Care Helps Baby Regulate Systems

Among the most important measurable changes for a baby during kangaroo care are regulation of body temperature, oxygen saturation levels, and respiratory and heart rates. As Dr Sears writes, babies spend a period of time after birth “getting organized.” One aspect of a baby’s organizing is the synchronization of heart rate and breathing, also referred to as “coupling,” and it can take as little as ten minutes in kangaroo care.

Because this closeness to parent is helping the baby regulate systems, there is more energy to be spent on successful breastfeeding, restful sleep, and growth.

As kangaroo care has become a common practice in hospitals, it has developed its rules and guidelines: baby wears only a diaper, baby is placed upright on the mother’s bare chest, baby is covered with a receiving blanket and held snugly to the mother. As I read the guidelines in several places, I wondered whether there was a place in this procedure for a mother’s instinct. I hope that these procedures aren’t meant to engineer away the need for a mother’s love and connection. Whether a parent follows these guidelines or not, their baby will thrive on sking-to-skin closeness.


Baby Saved by a Mother’s Love

A story that was in the news last August has astonished many. When an Australian mother was told that one of her two babies, born prematurely at 27 weeks, had not survived, she instinctively took the time to hold him, to tell him his name and what she would have liked to have done with him during his life. She undressed the baby and held him on her chest for two hours. Doctors told her that his periodic gasps were just a reflex, but she fed him breastmilk on her finger and he breathed. Though he weighed only 2lbs and doctors had declared him dead after working to save his life for 20 minutes, he lived. His mother’s warmth, touch, loving voice, and nutrition saved him. The story was published after she appeared on an Australian television show, carrying her five-month old son to interviews to help people understand the importance of kangaroo care.

That this baby was saved by his mother’s love may seem like a sentimental interpretation of the story, but the extensive research on kangaroo care bears this out. The benefits of skin-to-skin contact with babies are physical, but they are also far beyond the physical.


Babies Thrive on Kangaroo Care

Marsupial care, the idea of nine months in and nine months out, is not at all new. In last week’s post on babywearing around the world, I mentioned research by a British prehistorian who found that a mother’s marsupial care of babies—babywearing—was essential to human evolution.

In one tiny baby we can see the benefit of putting energy toward growth rather than the effort to regulate systems. The mother isn’t just an added bonus in this situation. The continued physical contact between mother and baby is essential to the individual baby. In the case of the baby in Australia, his mother’s closeness saved his life. Maybe this is true more than we realize. If this is true person by person, it makes sense that such care scaled up to a species level helped to focus development. More babies survived. More babies put their energy into growth, and everyone who followed them benefitted.

Babies thrive in kangaroo care. Kangaroo care isn’t a nice addition or a recent phenomenon but a necessity for all babies to reach their full physical and emotional potential.


Resources

Baby Carrier Industry Alliance, “Position Paper on Babywearing and Kangaroo Care,” October 2010.

“Kangaroo Care,” Cleveland Clinic, 1995 (reviewed January 15, 2009).

Holly Richardson, “Kangaroo Care: Why Does It Work?” Midwifery Today, volume 44, Winter 1997.

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Babywearing Around the World

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A Black Hmong woman carries her baby on her back

A Black Hmong woman carries her baby on her back

International Babywearing Week celebrates babywearing around the world. New innovations is mass-marketed baby carriers often have their roots in long traditions. Really, carrying a baby is quite simple. Women use what they have to hold their babies close while they go about their busy lives.

In the end, the differences in traditional baby carriers around the world are minor.

Asian baby carriers are generally a square or rectangle of fabric with straps to tie around the mother.

Both the Mexican rebozo and the African kanga are simple rectangles about the size of a baby blanket or a shawl (since they are shawls, after all). These simple pieces of cloth can be worn in many ways, often with two shawls—one around the mother’s upper body taking the weight of the baby’s bottom and one around the mother’s middle holding the baby in snuggly.

Even the 19th-century plaid (Scottish great kilt or Earasaid) that my husband has from his family was used as a baby carrier by Scots women.

Where cloth is less common, we find solid carriers like cradle boards and baskets, which women tie to their bodies, hang from a tree, or even hook over a horse’s saddle, in the case of a Navajo (Diné) craddleboard.

Around the world, women used what they had to carry their babies. What is clear and certain is that women use baby carriers to make the task easier. Women have always used baby carriers to make their lives easier—and I use the word “always” in a lose sense to mean for millions of years.

Wearing a baby rather than carrying in arms or not carrying at all was practical, but the results of our ancestors 2.2 million years ago creating slings for their babies were that development continued outside the womb. In a recent book, prehistorian Dr. Timothy Taylor found that attachment to mother by a sling and the safety that brought meant development of bigger brains.

Yes, that’s what I wrote, and here’s what he said, “Courtesy of the baby sling, our ancestors got smarter.“ Taylor finds that the baby sling is one of those technologies that changed the course of human evolution.

To see the amazing variety of ways that women carry their babies around the world, see this great Flickr collection of babywearing around the world. There are 400+ images, so sit back and enjoy the slide show.

Image © Pachot | Dreamstime.com

Men Who Wear Babies

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Want a good cry, mothers? Peaceful Parenting at DrMomma.org asked last year during International Babywearing Week that men from around the world send in their babywearing photos. From these 729 photos, Danelle Frisbie put together a beautiful babywearing mosaic proving that Real Men Wear Babies.

Go look at these photos one by one.

Please tell me it’s not just me in tears. This collection of photos gives me hope for the world and for babywearing. I love seeing men with their babies.

Close Enough to Kiss

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International Babywearing Week 2010

October 6-12 is International Babywearing Week, when people around the world show the variety of ways they wear their babies and keep them close enough to kiss.

Find an official celebrating organization, and see some of the ways organizations around the world celebrate babywearing. Check out the world’s longest baby sling from Budapest, Hungary, during last year’s celebration.