Extending massage therapy to include our children is an important step in full-family healing. Our massage therapist, Mollie Byrd, offers Infant Massage Classes, that teach the art of infant/child massage, to more easily incorporate this practice into your home and lifestyle. Classes are capped at 6 students, and are offered strategically throughout the year. To check availability, and to schedule with the upcoming class, please contact our office.
Benefits for infants, babies and children include the following:
• Provides a special time of communication that fosters love, compassion, and respect.
• Improves general well-being.
• Improves overall function of the gastrointestinal tract.
• Promotes relaxation and helps babies self-soothe.
• Helps to normalize muscle tone.
• Improves circulation.
• Enhances immune system function.
• Helps improve sensory and body awareness.
• Enhances neurological development.
• Helps baby/child sleep deeper and more soundly.
• Helps to increase oxygen and nutrient flow to cells.
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Improves respiration.
• Helps to improve pain management; can relieve discomfort from teething.
• Helps improve congestion, gas, and colic.
• Enhances hormone release in the body (the growth hormone can be stimulated which can help weight gain.)
• Reduces levels of cortisol, the stress hormone.
• Provides all of the essential indicators of intimate parent-infant bonding and attachment: eye-to-eye, touch, voice, smell, movement, and thermal regulation.
• Stimulates all of the physiological systems. Massage sparks neurons to grow and
branch out to encompass other neurons.
Benefits for parents and primary caregivers include:
• Encourages pre-verbal communication between caregiver and infant.
• Helps parents feel more confident and competent in caring for their children.
• Helps ease stress (ie if one or more parent must be separated from their
children for extended periods during the workday.)
• Provides parents with one-on-one quiet time or interactive play with their children.
• Increases parents’ self-esteem by reinforcing and enhancing their skills as parents, and validates their role.
• Gives parents the tools for understanding their child’s unique rhythms and patterns.
• Teaches parents how to read their infants’ cues and recognize their states of awareness.
• Gives parents a special way to interact with their children who may be hospitalized. Helps parents feel a greater part of the healing process.
• Daily massage helps parents unwind and relax.
