Are you spoiling your baby by cuddling?

Here's what experts have to say

One piece of advice doled out to every new mother is regarding the danger of cuddling newborns too much and spoiling them in the process. Those who do not abide by this alleged golden rule of peaceful parenting, constantly feel the pressure of justifying their baby’s demanding needs with the ridiculous fear of ‘bad, spoiled baby’ clouding their parenthood bliss.

However, here is a tiny caveat: there is no such thing as ‘good baby’, or ‘bad baby’. Babies do not emerge into the world having memorised the so-called ‘good baby manual’. Their emotional needs of being cuddled and nurtured are as legitimate as their physical needs of being fed and changed. This does not make them ‘high maintenance’, just unapologetically human.

Why do babies want to cuddle?              

If newborns could describe their transition from womb to room, they would use words as traumatic and sensory overload, mainly because of limited communication and cognitive skills they are equipped with at the time of birth. Many scientists quip that the first three months after birth can be deemed as the fourth trimester as babies adjust to their new surroundings. Compared to the warm, dark, soft, and muffled confines of a womb, devoid of any smells, where a baby gets constant nutrition and maintains skin-to-skin contact with the mother, the outside world must appear to be a battle field. A place that is cold and hard, with loud noises and fluctuating temperatures, coupled with dramatically less contact and newfound feelings of hunger and thirst.

A womb is devoid of smells, where a baby gets constant nutrition. Screengrab from Youtube.

Being removed from their snug cocoons of warmth puts babies in a sensory overdrive and thus, they huff and puff and kick up a storm unless they are held, only to start all over again when put down. But even then, it is unfair to label them ‘clingy or difficult’. If you could experience their surroundings vicariously, you would realise being cuddled fills babies with a sense of security and surety. The need for cuddle is more than a whim; it’s a protective mechanism naturally induced at the time of birth.

How much cuddling is too much?

Parents who cuddle their children for comfort or sleep are chided or guilt-tripped for supposedly hindering the baby’s developmental milestones. Au contraire, cuddling is everything but detrimental. Over 600 scientific papers have been published on the power of human touch. Babies develop the sense of touch before any other sense, just at eight weeks of gestation. Being touched stimulates tactile nerve endings in the skin triggering release of endorphins, oxytocin, and serotonin, also called the love hormones, which decrease baby’s distress and produce pleasant sensations.

Being removed from their snug cocoons puts babies in a sensory overdrive. PHOTO: TRCTHOUGHTS.COM

Studies underscoring the impact of different types of touches from simple holding to holding in specific positions such as the ‘Tiger in the Woods’ have found positive correlations between being held and promotion of infant physiologic stability, regulation of sleep, improved breastfeeding and weight gain, and development of parents’ bond with the baby.

Moreover, loving care helps babies in acquisition of language and cultural understanding. It also mirrors tender and sympathetic view of their surroundings, absence of which has been shown to develop sentiments of aggression and defensiveness in children. In fact, this compelling nature of evidence has led to a paradigm shift in favour of holding newborns. Parents are also facilitated in establishing uninterrupted contact with their babies, especially in case of preterm babies admitted in NICU, by changing facility design from open bays to private rooms.

Parents are facilitated in establishing uninterrupted contact with their babies. PHOTO: WINNIPEGNEONATAL.WORDPRESS.COM

Different forms of infant cuddling have also been developed, such as skin-to-skin where baby is laid bare on the chest of a family member, preferably mother, holding or rocking, and facilitated tucking which involves holding babies’ arms and legs flexed and close to the trunk of body. This leads to regulation of physiologic responses such as oxygen saturation, decrease in pain perception and increase satisfaction for parents. In the long run, it instills emotions including empathy and self-confidence, improves school performance and immunity resulting from direct transference of beneficial bacterial microbiome from parents’ body to that of a child.

Different forms of infant cuddling have been developed. PHOTO: 123rf.com

Conversely, concrete scientific data also delineates the negative impact of poor care-giving relationship in children whose care has been interrupted from being placed in orphanages or due to poor family environments. These impacts include poor cognitive, social or physiological development or malnutrition and overtime, less vocalisation and communication by the babies.

On the other hand, a lack of sensitivity and responsiveness from caregivers may also lead to an inability to detect diseases at early stage which can prove fatal. So sing, swaddle, sway and cuddle away with your baby. Give all your attention to your precious little ones because they won’t be this young forever.