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How Kangaroo Care Can Help Your Preemie

By Lyn Mettler

Most new parents get to bond with their babies immediately after birth, but according to experts, 7 percent of all babies are born premature, and those parents may have to wait weeks before ever holding their baby. Thanks to a technique called "Kangaroo Care," however, parents of premature babies are getting to hold their newborns much sooner – and help their little ones at the same time.

Krisanne and Gene Larimer of Colorado Springs, Colo., only had to wait five days before holding their baby girl who weighed just over a pound at birth. Krisanne nervously tried touching her baby, only to be discouraged by alarms alerting nurses to a problem with the baby's heart. When she tried Kangaroo Care, with the baby skin-to-skin on her chest, it was a different story. "Every time I'd touched her before that, her alarms would just sound," says Larimer. "With Kangaroo Care, there were no alarms. I felt like a mom for the first time then."

Kangaroo Care allows moms and dads to hold their babies, wearing only diapers, on their bare chest up to several times a day. This skin-to-skin contact has numerous benefits, both emotional and physical, for both the baby and parents. "We mammals have been doing this for eons," says Theresa Kledzik, an infant development nurse specialist at Memorial Hospital in Colorado Springs, Colo. "It seems like a natural instinct thing to do."

Doctors in Bogotá, Colombia developed the technique in 1983 in response to the number of premature babies dying at their hospital. Because the facility had unreliable equipment and power, the doctors decided to see if the babies would do better with their moms. The women carried their babies around all the time on their bare chests – under their shirts, in their bras or in specially-designed pouches (thus the term "kangaroo"). Through Kangaroo Care, the doctors were able to decrease the mortality rate from 70 percent to 30 percent.

After these findings, the world began to take note and do further research on Kangaroo Care. The idea first spread through Europe, and then in 1988, Susan Ludington, currently a professor at the University of Maryland School of Nursing, began doing studies in the U.S. Now hospitals across the country and the world are offering Kangaroo Care, and countless research studies have documented the benefits.

Placing babies on bare skin helps keep them warm, a task that is difficult for premature babies who have not yet developed the layer of fat that full-term babies have. Moms also seem to have an innate way of adjusting their body temperature to meet the baby's needs. For example, if Baby gets too hot, Mom will cool down and vice versa. Ludington, also the author of Kangaroo Care: The Best Thing You Can Do to Help Your Preterm Infant

Want to see more?

• Are You Prepared for a Preemie? A Guide to Preterm Babies
• Nurturing Your NICU Baby
• Decoding Your Preemie's Signals
• Talk about it!