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Then they followed all the babies, examining them when they were 3, 6, 12 and 24 months old, and again when they were 5 and 10 years old. Back then, though, the benefits weren’t proven, so we just asked one hospital if we could introduce it there.”įeldman and her team ran the study twice-once in 1996 and again in 1998-switching which hospital did and didn’t provide the kangaroo care, in order to neutralize that as a variable. “Today,” Feldman says, “withholding KC from one group of preemies would be an ethical issue. The babies had an average gestational age of 30 weeks-meaning they were ten weeks premature-and an average weight of 2.8 lbs. One group got standard treatment, which meant no KC at the other, the mothers would hold their preemies for one hour per day for 14 days. In 1996, Feldman assembled two sample groups of 73 babies each at two different Israeli hospitals. Most hospitals felt the risk of exposing preemies and other frail newborns to germs outweighed the undocumented benefits of holding them. Though kangaroo care is standard treatment in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) today-at least for babies who can spend time outside of incubators-in the 1990s, it wasn’t. ( MORE: The Mystery of Why More Black Babies Than White Babies Die in Infancy) Nearly 18 years ago, however, Ruth Feldman, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Bar-Ilan university in Tel Aviv, thought she might have a solution.

But since you can hardly run a long-term experiment in which you instruct one set of parents to hold their infants and another to let theirs mind themselves, there’s never been any way to measure these benefits accurately.

Babies who get constant cuddling tend to sleep better, manage stress more easily and exhibit better autonomic functions, such as heart rate. It’s no secret that what doctors and parents are increasingly referring to as kangaroo care (KC)-or the simple business of holding babies as much as possible as opposed to leaving them in their cribs or playpens-can have real developmental benefits.