Safe Babywearing Practices All Wrapped Up

Wearing your baby does a world of good, yes, but it’s no good if the way you carry your little one in a carrier does a world of harm to your back, your neck, or your posture.  It’s also no good to race around wearing baby, doing as much as you can, without a bit of mindful forethought about the types of babywearing task-management that might put baby at risk of discomfort, or even injury. Here’s some safety practices to remember, both for you and baby, while wearing a carrier.
The Carrier (You!)
As the carrier of the baby, here are a few tips to help you avoid straining your shoulders, neck, and spine.
Deliberate during your choice of baby carriers. Try each on.  Some store provide a stuffed doll or bear, but I recommend a sack of flour or sugar (10 pounds), which provides a more realistic feel of how the straps and hip strap will feel on your muscles.Ask for a store employees assistance in adjusting the carrier. Make sure you understand how to adjust it ideally for your posture protection.  Even watch yourself walk – this is a far cry from the catwalk, I know – and notice whether your posture and stride are different with the carrier (and sugar baby) on.Wear the carrier around the store while you register for other baby items.  How does it feel after ten minutes?  After thirty?If you are familiar with the spine, yoga, chiropractics, or pilates, consider neutral spine.  Notice whether you can easily maintain a neutral spine – not arched or curved – and upright shoulders – not curved or thrown back – while wearing the carrier.
If you’re like me, your posture isn’t even this good when you’re walking on your own, without a carrier or a baby in it.  That’s why I’d also recommend a little tool my wife first read about in O Magazine, and later in Cooking Light.
It’s called the iPosture (available at http://www.iposture.com/)  It’s price has come down significantly.  It attaches to a tank-top strap, bra strap, or (what serendipity) a baby carrier strap.  After you calibrate it to notice when you are in a healthy posture, it will vibrate if you are slumped for more than one minute.
The Carried (Your Baby!)
Insure safety by reading all of the directions.  Read them several times and practice each step of the strap-tightening or wrap-tying technique.  If you are raising your baby with one or more adult caregivers, practice together and check each other.
Recently, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a warning about baby sling safety. Sadly, there have been deaths. Improper use can definitely harm your baby – this includes baby’s face pressed into the fabric, a possible suffocation hazard. If your baby’s body is too curled in such that the chin is tucked into the chest, quickly adjust your baby’s position so they can breathe properly. Slings are very safe, but like everything else, they must be used as directed.

Don’t be swayed by the simplicity of your chosen baby carrier’s design. I don’t want to make you hyper-paranoid, but always check your baby’s position, and if a week or two goes by when you don’t use the carrier, re-read the instructions so you are very familiar with how to wear your baby – especially if your infant is less than four months old.

Put Down That Spatula
Face it! We are proud multi-taskers. And there’s nothing like the 24/7 addition of a new baby to your line-up of duties and responsibilities to make you want to cheat time all the more.
This is one of the best qualities of using a baby carrier. Exercise, light house cleaning (no chemicals, of course), de-cluttering, laundry folding, email, phone calls, mail sorting, shopping, and reading are just a few baby-carrier-friendly activities.

I certainly don’t want to insult your intelligence, but there are a few not so obvious situations where multitasking with your baby in the carrier can be downright risky or harmful. Here’s the shortlist of perhaps unconsidered ill-advised activities:

* Any activity on wheels: skateboarding, skating, bikeriding, scooters, ATVs.

* Any mutimedia viewing that will be too visually intense, loud, or prolonged for baby, including computer work, TV viewing, and video games.

* Cooking: with the stove, oven, or microwave, or any other electric device (blender, toaster, food processor). While buttering toast, be mindful of an older baby’s curious reach, which might lead to grabbing the wrong end of the knife.

* Any activity in which you’re inclined to bend at the hips: Using the restroom, yardwork, picking up toys. Always remember to bend at the knees and keep your back – and hence your baby – upright.

* Seated desk work: With baby in a front carry, particularly if legs are dangling, her posture and hips can be curled and crunched unnaturally.

When in doubt, take baby out. If you have even a second thought about whether an activity is safe to do with your baby in the carrier, don’t do it. I can remember even a seemingly harmless activity – escorting my son on his first pony-ride with my daughter in a front carrier. First, she got her fingers wedged under the bridle, then I slipped in some horse manure and nearly lost my balance.
Bottom Line
For safe babywearing, be a contingency thinker. I’m not encouraging the kind of paranoia parenthood tends to bring on, anyway. Rather, by considering all of the possible outcomes to your posture and to your baby’s well-being, you might just be able acquire the kind of foresight you’ll need down the road when your kids are teenagers.

How Babywearing Makes A Difference: 5 Reasons

Wearing your baby has benefits too many to list.  But I’ll try.  There are five major areas of your baby’s well-being that can be improved by choosing to carry him at least some of the time, from birth through age two.
Most significantly, research shows measurable benefits for baby and parents if babywearing is part of the family’s routine in the first six months.  Here are the top five reasons why wearing your baby in a carrier or sling is beneficial:
Physical Benefits
For both full term and premature infants, the benefits of wearing your baby are multiple.  First, baby is made relaxed and at ease, being close to a parent.  Baby’s awareness of the parent heartbeat actually helps her to regulate her own heartbeat.  The same goes for respiration.
The upright holds that can be used in wearing your baby will lessen colic, because gravity will keep nourishment in the baby’s tummy, reducing acid reflux.
Finally, baby learns to regulate body temperature and avoids getting overheated or chilled when carried close to the mother’s breast.  Scientists found that the breast can rise two degrees Fahrenheit in a matter of several minutes when the mother’s body senses her baby is cold.
Cognitive Benefits
Even in the womb, a baby is regularly exposed to a dynamic environment of changing sounds, lights, shadows, voices, and movement. Imagine entering the world only to find it a lot more boring than the womb. Such is the experience of babies swaddled and placed in cribs, pack-n-plays, bassinets, strollers, and swings for extended periods of time.
Now, I’m not suggesting that you never put your baby down. However, regular carrying around the house, on walks, and on errands provides crucial cognitive stimulation. Baby’s sight is developing, including depth perception and color differentiation. Providing stimulus for this visual development can only help.
Finally, consider all of the brightly colored toys marketed to parents. These toys are meant to attach to car seats, strollers, crib railings, or bassinets. But what babies really want is a first class one-on-one tour of the world with you, their favorite tour guide. The world, with all its moving and noisy parts, is baby’s ideal toy. Being carried on your chest or back is baby’s best vantage point to see, touch, and interact with this toy.

To this day, my sixteen month-old daughter loves to be front carried on walks so that she can touch leaves, branches, bark, and the occasional flower. Of course, she also loves to break into a toddler-tumble-run and touch all these things on her own.
Emotional Benefits
By wearing your baby every day, the two of you will learn a great deal more about each other at an amazing rate. You will feel more and more like a parent as you learn the various sways and bounces that soothe your baby when she’s distressed or tired. This is especially confidence-building for first time parents during baby’s first eight weeks.
When an infant is born, doctors recommend almost immediate skin to skin contact to provide a sense of security, after being removed from the most secure place she’s ever known. The first three months, sometimes called the fourth trimester, show baby’s continuing need for the love, closeness, and security of a parent.
Development Benefits
Especially in colicky or premature infants, Kangaroo care – the practice of carrying at-risk infants almost all day, every day – has been clinically shown to speed up weight gain, reduce dependence on respiratory support, and decrease rate of infection among these infants.
While not as dramatic for healthy full term infants, babywearing provides developmental benefits for them too. Babywearing enhances your awareness of baby’s hunger cues, prompting more timely and sometimes more frequent feeding.

Parents’ Benefits
I can’t remember how many times I looked into the co-sleeper when my daughter, now nearly four, slept in it in the first few weeks after her birth. Every parent is sensitive to that desire to know what baby’s very sound, cry, and squirm might mean. My wife and I used to wonder whether we’d ever know what our daughter’s cries meant.
The more we wore her around the house to do simple tasks, or around the neighborhood to get some exercise, the faster we learned. The learning curve for parents of newborns is steep enough. Babywearing helped us to climb the curve with less effort.
Being hands-free was also a plus not to be overlooked. While I couldn’t cook an omlette, I got very good, and very grateful, that I was able to wear my baby while taking regular walks, going through the mail, cleaning the house, talking on the phone or reading a book.

Bottom Line
We live in a country where the dominant culture prizes independence and that go-it-alone attitude, which is passed along to our infants early on, with books that promise to train a baby to sleep on her own at eight weeks, to self-soothe, or to cry it out.
Yet, research proves that going it alone does not provide the substantial benefits to baby’s well-being that are experienced by babies who are regularly close to parents in a sling or carrier. Developmental, emotional, cognitive, physical, and parental benefits show what a difference babywearing inarguably makes.