(relaxed music)
- Massage, anyone can do.
You can do it as a dad.
You can do it as an aunt.
You can do it as a grandparent.
And it really does increase your bond with your child.
And the massage decreases their stress hormones,
increases their bonding hormones.
And this leads to a whole cascade of benefits
around improved nutrition, improved neural development,
improved physical coordination, better sleep.
It's a really nice opportunity for mother and child
to just spend some quiet time together.
The main part is to touch your child.
It's that skin to skin contact.
It's interacting with your child.
These are the things that are fundamental to massage.
And I always feel that in our society where there are more
and more rules around touch, and who's allowed to touch who,
and who's not allowed to touch who,
that introducing your child at a very young age
to healthy touch is a really wonderful gift for your child
because then they always have
that fundamental understanding of healthy touch.
You're face to face with your child.
You always wanna be face to face with your child
when doing a massage.
You can talk to them.
I always like moms to just let them know what they're doing
like, "Oh, we're gonna do a little massage with you today.
"Isn't that gonna be nice,"
practice putting their hands on them.
So when you're working with your child,
you do want to use an oil.
If you don't, you kind of catch on the skin,
and it's irritating.
So you want an oil.
On limbs, you really wanna make sure you get into this
little L area, L for limbs, and as well as the palms.
You wanna use a plant-based oil.
The specific oil is not important
as long as it's a quality oil.
You want to use a plant-based oil,
preferably one that's cold based.
It can be as simple as your household olive oi.
I prefer something like grapeseed oil as it's lighter.
The olive oil's got quite a thick touch.
I tend to use something called rice bran oil.
It's an oil that I found.
I use it in my practice.
And I like it because it absorbs well
and it's very stable, so it doesn't go rancid.
(relaxed music)
With the full body massage, we like to start on the legs.
And you always wanna start with one limb.
So we start with what's called the airplane,
and this is the only stroke where you want a stiff hand.
So you just touchdown across the foot.
It's a nice simple stroke.
And most of these strokes you wanna do two or three times.
Next thing I do is two thumbs coming on to the heel.
We make little circles going up the length of the foot.
And in terms of rate,
you do wanna be slower rather than faster.
Slower is more sedating.
If you go too fast, it can be very stimulating for baby.
So you do about three of those little thumb circles,
and then you just grasp a hold
of their little toes and roll.
To give you an example, it just looks like this.
Now sometimes babies will be all rolled up
both in toes and hands.
What you can do is just insert your thumb inside
and just work on opening those up a little bit.
Next, we're gonna move up into doing what's called wringing.
We're going to put our two Ls, like we talked about, here.
We're going to roll them back and forth.
Now if baby is not very cooperative and wants to pull
that leg in as they sometimes do, I suggest that just
cup the ankle and just do one hand at a time.
You go all the way up to the hip and all the way back down.
And then you do the other side.
So when you're doing it one handed,
it does take a little bit longer because you have to,
one whole leg stroke takes a little bit longer,
but go all the way up and all the way down.
And after you've done that two or three times,
just cup the whole leg, and this is called milking.
I've never milked a cow
but I'm guessing that's what it's named after.
And this is the one stroke you wanna avoid
as your child starts to reach three
because they get valves in their veins.
And at that point, you don't wanna push
against the pressure of those valves.
So it causes varicosities in older people
as those valves start to give way.
You always wanna do one leg at a time.
It starts to help baby distinguish
between its two separate sides and realize
that different things can happen to different sides.
A big part of the crawling mechanism
is getting babies to be able to do this.
I always like to finish with just a little bit
of what I call the bicycle.
And don't be shy about taking the knees up into the belly.
This starts the whole process
of just getting things moving through there.
This also, of course,
mimics the early crawling movement of the legs.
Then we cup behind the knees,
and we do a little circle like this.
And again, this is right to left.
This goes back to the clockwise issue.
This is always the direction you want to go,
is from baby's right over to baby's left.
(relaxed music)
The tummy stuff is of course our most delicate area,
but it's an area that can most benefit from massage,
especially if baby's having any colic or gas.
This is the most basic stroke, is just the rainbow.
And you can also do what's called paddling or fulling.
And for that, you wanna put your pinky edge of your hand
right at the bottom of the rib cage
that you can sink into the soft part of the abdomen.
You don't wanna press in or anything,
but you do wanna sink in just a little bit.
And then just pull the hand down.
Pull that border of the hand down, just like that.
It's a very simple stroke.
All of these things help to stimulate baby's digestion,
help move food through the digestive track,
which reduces gas, diarrhea, constipation,
all of those things, and of course improves absorption
of the food which helps baby grow.
And then we start to transition into the chest.
I do call this the cross the heart,
come all the way up from the hip.
You do want to really make an effort
to cup around the shoulder like this.
It really feels more complete for baby,
very supportive and warm.
And then we move up into the chest,
and we just do a little heart.
So you start with your fingers
just at the base of the chest bone, the sternum.
Come up.
You make a little heart, and you come back down
to the point at the bottom of that sternum.
And you come up and around and down.
And how many fingers you use has to do
with the size of your baby, the size of your hands.
It's all quite relative.
It might just be two fingers or even one finger,
or it might be almost the whole hand.
And do that two or three times.
(relaxed music)
And the arm and the leg, I try to make them fairly similar
because it's an easier thing to remember.
But we do start with our little thumb circles on the palm.
We make circles up to the base of the fingers.
And again, we just do the little rotation
of the fingers next, just like with the thumbs.
So you're just rotating them in their socket.
And again, if they don't wanna open up,
just rotate the thumb in there,
just stimulate the palm of the hand a little bit.
And then we just grasp here at the wrist,
and we just give a little shake.
And sometimes baby will let their hand wiggle like that,
which is ideal.
Sometimes they won't, but it's always nice to give it a try.
We move back to our Ls.
Often, at this point, more oil is needed in here.
We get in to do the wringing.
And with the arms especially, we do often see
the need to just do one hand at a time,
partly because of just the size of the real estate.
Arms are small.
Once you've done that two or three times, you do the milking
just like in the leg, down from the top, down to the wrist.
And you'll notice that on the limbs, we have always
tended to finish with a stroke that goes down
and close to the body out to the ends of the limbs,
and that's because it's in the direction of hair growth.
And smoothing in the direction of hair growth
is a more sedating stroke, so it's a nice way to finish.
The wringing is a little bit more of a stimulating stroke
but it encourages blood flow and gets more into the muscles.
So that's why we start with that,
kind of get things going and then just calm them down.
So from there, we would go on to the other arm.
Do the same thing there.
Again, as I said, you do one limb and then the other limb,
but they're mirror images of each other.
(relaxed music)
And then we would finish by turning baby over.
Sometimes you need to let them prop up on their arms.
We did across the heart on the front.
You do the same stroke on the back.
You start with your hands down by the hip.
If they have their diaper off,
you can start right down on their little bottoms,
otherwise, just above the waist of the diaper.
When you come up, you do a little crossover.
And again, this completion of following your fingers
all the way around the shoulder
is a nice finished feeling to the stroke for the child.
And then some of the biggest muscles
that are working during the early developmental phase
of starting to lift the head and starting to sit up
and eventually walk, the muscles that run along the spine,
they're called your spinal erectors.
And as their name implies,
they're all about making the spine be erect.
So we do like to give them a little extra attention.
And usually, just a couple of fingers is all we need.
Place them just to either side of the spine
on that thick cord of muscle that runs here.
And we just do little circles like this.
And again, if your child's a little bit bigger
or your hands are a little bit smaller,
you may find that three fingers is needed, and that's fine.
And if you're a little bit wide of those muscles,
you're overflowing into the rest of the back, that's fine.
And these muscles can actually be traced
all the way up into the skull.
They go right up to the base
of where the skull pokes out in the back.
And we can actually follow those if baby's amenable.
A lot of times, in this position,
the baby's head is back, so not always possible,
but it is an option if baby will let you.
And the other thing is to,
sometimes if baby doesn't like to be on tummy,
we'll get you to do the massage in a seated position.
And in that position, because you can support the chest,
you can go all the way up into the neck quite easily.
And you wanna follow that all the way up,
almost halfway up the back of the head those muscles come.
So you would do small circles,
just following along one side of the spine.
Now again, you're down to one hand, (chuckles)
and you do always wanna circle away
from the spine rather than bumping into
the spinous processes in the middle.
And then again, in that sedating manner, we wanna go down.
And you can actually include
the back of the head in the stroke, just down.
And this is a very natural stroke.
This is something most parents do
at some point with their child, just a gentle stroke.
But again, this is just sedating.
It's very comforting.
And you wanna keep your hands soft.
You'll notice my hands were soft.
They weren't rigid through the massage.
You want nice, broad, soft contact, and slow.
So that's plenty fast.
And that can be one hand, or that can be two hands.
(relaxed music)
And there, we've covered the whole baby.
It's always nice to be making lots of eye contact
with your child.
It's also nice to just be chatting a little bit
with the child, letting them know what you're doing,
asking them if they're enjoying themselves.
Like, "Oh, does that feel nice?"
And they'll start to communicate with you too.
You'll notice that their arm
will be more relaxed or less relaxed.
They'll be making vocalizations,
letting you know that that feels nice.
Or they'll kind of giggle,
especially if you do some of the tummy stuff.
This process, just as it lowers stress hormones in babies,
lowers stress hormones in us and encourages the production
of oxytocin, which moms hear about mostly
in conjunction with their breastfeeding,
that this is a chemical that happens then.
But this happens in all human beings in the bonding process,
and touch, skin to skin touch is a huge part of that.
I often suggest in the evening
because it does encourage sleep.
You can set up a nice little rhythm of bath, massage, bed.
And having it integrated into a certain part of the day
can help baby be a little more receptive.
We can never control whether or not baby is going to be
in the right state of mind, sadly, but we can kind of try
and capitalize on a rhythm to it and an expectation
on the child's part that this is coming.
(relaxed music)