BPS Research Digest

By Emma Young

Few things are as stressful as listening to your baby crying — and excessive crying is clearly not good for the baby, either. Skin-to-skin contact is widely used in the first hours after a birth, with benefits for infants and parents. But, according to a new paper in Developmental Psychology, a daily hour of skin-to-skin contact for weeks afterwards is beneficial, too: it reduces crying and improves sleep.

Kelly Cooijmans at Radboud University, in the Netherlands, and her colleagues recruited Dutch healthy first-time mothers with full-term infants for their randomized controlled trial. On signing up while pregnant, the women knew they were taking part in a trial aimed at improving infant crying and sleep, but not what the intervention would be.

Prolonged mother-infant skin-to-skin contact is not part of Dutch culture, the team notes. So when one group was instructed to perform “care as usual”, extended skin-to-skin contact took place only immediately after birth. The other group was asked to ensure that their baby had an hour a day of this contact for five weeks. The mothers were also asked to report on a range of measures, including how long their infant cried and slept, for the first 12 weeks of their baby’s life. (As women in the Netherlands get 12 weeks of paid maternity leave, the team felt that this would all be practically feasible.)

Only relatively few women — 16 of an initial 64 in the daily contact group — did actually fully follow the protocol. Their babies cried less overall and had shorter individual crying bouts. In their first few days of life, they slept for longer, too. The data also suggested a dose-response relationship between skin contact and crying: more minutes of contact was associated with less crying and also, in the first days at least, more sleep. “Our findings suggest that extended [skin to skin contact] adds to the already beneficial effects during the first postnatal hours/days, at least regarding infant crying and sleeping,” the team writes.

There are various potential mechanisms. Warm, soft, human touch signals that a caregiver is there, close at hand. It is known to be calming. Skin-to-skin contact also specifically triggers the release of oxytocin in both the mother and infant, the team adds — and this has known stress-reducing effects. Advantages of the intervention are, the team writes, that it is “uncomplicated and low cost”.

However, while it might carry no immediate financial cost for women on paid maternity leave, the high drop-out rate certainly suggests that the mothers did perceive it to have other kinds of costs. In fact, 10% reported having trouble fitting it into their daily routine and 14% said that their own mental or physical recovery problems made it difficult. 

It’s true that when these women were recruited, there was no evidence that time invested in regular daily skin-to-skin contact could have a pay-off in terms of reduced crying, the team notes. Perhaps the new, preliminary data might encourage some new mothers to try the protocol. And there were some significant benefits. In week 2, for example, the team reports a daily crying duration of 106 minutes for those mothers who fully followed the protocol vs 129 for the control. That’s an average of 23 fewer minutes spent crying per day.

Still, it’s worth noting that the mothers in the intervention group paid for this with an hour a day of their time. Keeping a baby close in a sling can be tricky enough; ensuring you’re in a suitable place each day for an hour of bare skin-to-skin contact is clearly even more demanding. Whatever a mother’s circumstances, let’s not pretend that there are no or “low” costs attached to the potential benefits, because that places very little value on her invested time. 

– Daily skin-to-skin contact and crying and sleeping in healthy full-term infants: A randomized controlled trial.

Emma Young (@EmmaELYoung) is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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June 30, 2022 – 6:02 pm /BPS Research Digest
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