What could be more touching?
Skin-to-skin contact is popular in Scandinavia. It is used as an alternative incubation for premature babies. It is believed that human contact helps these weak babies get back on their feet better than complete isolation in a soulless device.
Particularly touching is this picture of a boy helping his father make skin-to-skin contact with his premature brothers.
The picture was taken in 2016 in Copenhagen (Denmark). The “kangaroo method” is another name for “skin to skin” contact.
The foundation of the technique is the placement of the infants on the mother’s or father’s exposed chest every day for anything between a few minutes to many hours.
Babies who use it quickly acclimate to their environment, improve cognitively, and put on weight.
The “kangaroo” method introduces the baby to the outside world very gently and naturally. It gives the effect of a soft simulation of all the senses in the child.
The child feels strokes, touches, hears the beat of the heart and the voice of the mother, feels the smell of breast milk and mother’s body.
There is a stimulation of a sense of balance, a sense of body position in space and movement.
Studies have shown that the condition of premature babies when using such contact stabilizes much faster than in an incubator. And the level of mortality and complications in small children is reduced.
In one study, the survival rate of children weighing from 1000 to 1500 g increased by 30-70%.
