A Report From Clinical Practice: Carrying Premature Babies

Dr. Waltraud Stening, University Children's Hospital Cologne

In recent years, early stimulation therapy and psychosocial care for premature babies have become increasingly important. Since 1991, we have been promoting physical closeness between parents and child at the University Children's Hospital Cologne.

The Kangaroo Method

One way we do this is through the kangaroo method. Premature babies are placed naked against a parent's bare skin for one to several hours a day, with the parent reclining in a comfortable garden chair.

Besides stimulating the children's various senses, this close physical contact has many benefits. Parents get to know their child's personality much earlier this way. They gain confidence in their own strength and in their child's abilities. What's more, these parents, who have become parents "early", are able to take on caregiving tasks for their child much sooner.

From Kangaroo Care to the Wrap in Everyday Hospital Life

Out of this close physical contact, it also came about that we offered parents the option of carrying their children during walks around the hospital grounds. This has since become so well established that the ward's single pram is now outnumbered by around 10 wraps. Almost every bed of a child fit to go outside now has its own wrap hanging beside it.

The cradle carry has clinically proven especially favourable for premature babies. We always position the little head on the edge of the fabric. This way it lies ideally straight in the wrap, and parents also have a good view of their child. As soon as the weather allows, we now see many parents (often together, too!) out walking with their children. For parents, it's an important step in learning to manage on their own with their child, without the nurses' supervision and without the monitoring of a heart-and-breathing monitor.

The Wrap in Everyday Care

The nurses, too, regularly carry the babies in the wrap. It's an ideal aid for very unsettled children. It's used particularly on the infant ward for babies of drug-dependent mothers going through withdrawal. These children seem to need a maximum amount of physical closeness and movement. The wrap makes it possible for a nurse to keep working while soothing the child at the same time; during this time she mainly attends to tidying tasks.

These are just two aspects of what is widely known as "gentle care" for premature babies. But it seems to me that physical contact between parents and children is of particular value to everyone involved.

From a letter by Dr. Waltraud Stening to Erika Hoffmann, reproduced with the kind permission of the author

Dr. Waltraud Stening worked at the University Children's Hospital Cologne, where she introduced the kangaroo method on the premature baby ward from mid-1991 onward. She researched the effects of physical contact and carrying on premature babies, publishing her findings in, among other places, the journal Monatsschrift Kinderheilkunde (1996) and in a detailed brochure for Penaten.