Nick Conneman is a Dutch pediatrician who spent the last month in Barcelona in an international conference on premature babies and is convinced that everything that happens at the time of birth and in the first days and months totally affects the body and mind of the newborn.
20 years ago it was thought that children were born insensitive and therefore did not suffer pain. The babies were intervened inside the maternal belly and even after birth without any anesthesia.
Now it is known that they may feel pain already from the third trimester of pregnancy, that loud or unpleasant noise bothers them, that intense lights cause them "terrible stress" and that "the forced loneliness of premature babies, intubated, housed in incubators and separated from their parents for safety" give rise to a "cascade of neurotoxic sequelae, of apoptotic type whose result can be translated into the development of an altered brain." Conneman advocates the use of the "kangaroo" method to help the baby to empathize better with his parents: "The simple skin-to-skin contact releases oxytocin in both the baby's and the mother's body" and even comments that some psychoneurological complications such as hyperactivity syndrome and attention deficit "They may have their origin in complications during the first few days after giving birth."
In studies of children born prematurely, it has been observed that many of them have learning disorders and poor performance. Up to 52% have school problems and emotional disabilities due to "Central processing defects, which hinders the development of skills to solve the problems of integration, organization and, when prioritizing, affects many other areas."
As he comments this could be minimized by humanizing the attention of babies individually with initiatives such as the kangaroo method, avoid noise in the units, excess light and all those measures that avoid stress or discomfort in babies: "The goal of individualized developmental care of the preterm infant is to improve brain development and thereby prevent unexpected toxic sensory overload in a still immature but rapidly growing nervous system."
There are more and more signs and studies (and they go ...) that indicate that what a baby needs, more than anything, is skin-to-skin contact with his mother, human warmth and avoiding stressful situations. It seems that "because he cries for a while nothing happens" begins to fall behind in history and hospital protocols are setting these guidelines advocating more and more humanization and allowing the baby to be in contact with his mother at all times . It seems that you start thinking about the needs of babies. It was time.
