"Kangaroo Care" Offers Developmental Benefits for Premature Newborns

Kangaroo Care delivers benefits beyond bonding and breastfeeding for a hospital's tiniest newborns. But while KC's benefits are known, its use is not widely promoted by hospitals. Researchers encourage hospitals to incorporate KC-type features by modifying neonatal intensive care units to make them calming places, positioning babies to promote physical and motor development, decreasing how much babies are handled to reduce their stress, improving wake-sleep cycles, and promoting a newborn's ability to stabilize important functions and to synchronize physiologic functions with his mother's for optimal development.