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If you’re a parent, you’ve probably realised by now how much babies love to feel your touch.

But did you know just how powerful your cuddles can be? To find out, we spoke to psychologists about how important touch and skin-to-skin contact is to babies’ early development, bonds with their parents and sense of wellbeing.

Why babies love cuddles

According to clinical psychologist Linda Blair, human babies are unique as mammals in the amount they need physical touch.

We're helpless for a relatively longer period in our life than any other creature. We need to be made warm, held, brought close. It's necessary for survival.

When you cuddle your child, both of you receive a flood of a hormone called oxytocin, which you may have heard referred to as ‘the love hormone’, owing to the warm, fuzzy feeling you might feel when it’s released.

According to Linda, this hormone is better understood as “a bonding hormone that makes you feel safe where you are and who you're with.” Oxytocin is released through making eye-contact with loved ones and friends, but it is most dramatically increased through touch. This means that cuddling your baby is a key way to strengthen the bond between you.

Developmental psychologist Suzanne Zeedyk agrees, “You boost your baby's sense of feeling safe, feeling like they belong. Physical closeness feels safe for a baby.” Skin-to-skin contact increases the level of oxytocin released in the brain. “It's sort of like turning up the volume on the stereo - it's much more powerful,” says Linda.

Linda adds that when you and your baby cuddle, “not only do you feel safe, but you also feel calmer and happier and satisfied.” This owes to the knock-on effect oxytocin has on other hormones within the brain.

Oxytocin allows serotonin to rise, which can contribute to feelings of happiness in you and your baby. It also leads to a hit of dopamine, which allows you to feel a sense of reward. On top of this, Oxytocin makes levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, drop in both of you.

This hormonal change leads to changes in your baby’s behaviour. “The more oxytocin your baby has in their body, the easier it will be for you as a parent,” says Suzanne. “They’ll cry less, they’ll cope with changes better and they'll be more patient. They'll sleep better too.”

Cuddles help babies manage stress

This balancing act of oxytocin and cortisol is key to how your baby learns to respond to stress. “A baby's stress system is incomplete at birth. It's very fragile and will change and develop on the basis of the experiences that a baby has,” says Suzanne. “That's really exciting, but it's also a little bit scary for grown-ups, because you start to realise how important you are to the baby.”

By cuddling your baby when they feel stressed and in need of that oxytocin boost, says Suzanne, they’re learning that they can feel safe with you and that they can trust you to meet their needs.

If you have enough comforting experiences as a baby, you feel safe, you feel relaxed. You build different neural pathways.

Can you cuddle your baby too much?

You may have heard from well-meaning friends and relatives that you’ll ‘make a rod for your own back’ by cuddling your baby too much. But according to Suzanne, the opposite can be true if you give your child cuddles when they need them. “They'll trust you more. By that I mean they’ll let you go to the loo for longer. They're less scared by you being gone. So you can spend an extra 15 seconds in the loo on your own before your baby's anxiety climbs. The baby can start to withstand longer and longer periods of stress, because they know you'll come back and the heart doesn't beat so fast in those periods of stress.”

Suzanne says that as a society, we’re often led to cuddle, carry and hug children less and less, whether that’s through children being placed in prams, car seats or strollers, but that their developing stress systems need plenty of physical touch in order for children to develop their own resilience.

The problem comes when you’re going against children’s desire to explore the world around as they gain greater independence. “As the baby grows, you want more and more exploring” says Linda, “but when I’m talking about growing, I’m talking about years, not weeks.”

Suzanne agrees, “If you are paying attention to what your baby needs, if you're paying attention to when they need closeness and you're paying attention to when they need distance, your baby will come to trust you, and then they'll now trust other people too.”

What are the long-term benefits of cuddling your baby?

An Israeli study conducted in 2014 compared a group of premature babies who had received skin-to-skin cuddles from their mothers from birth and those who had significantly less skin-to-skin contact. Remarkably, the 10-year-old children who had been held more by their mums responded less dramatically to stress, their sleep was more consistent, and they had better control of their behaviour than the other group. There was also better back and forth interaction between children and their parents. This suggests that cuddling children as babies can have a lasting positive effect.

Linda suspects that learning about turn-taking is part and parcel of early cuddles, as during these bonding moments, parents focus on their child’s needs in an up-close and personal way. “If the baby starts squirming, you naturally loosen up. If the baby is shivering, you naturally cuddle more. You're teaching turn-taking: they express a need, and you respond. It deepens the parent-child bond, but it also makes the baby more aware of the importance of turn-taking in a relationship without them knowing.”

Turn-taking is key to children’s social skills as they learn to communicate, forming the basis of conversation as they learn language.

Suzanne is keen to stress that regular cuddling and skin-to-skin contact could potentially have a lifelong impact on their babies. She wants parents to realise that while this may make them feel anxious, they deserve to know how important it is, so that they take cuddling seriously.

It is sweet, but it’s also really, really, really important.

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