Skin-to-skin ‘kangaroo’ baby care tied to better health years later

Premature and underweight newborns may be healthier as children and young adults if they pass their early days with their bare chests nestled directly against their mothers’ breasts, a new study suggests.
             

Researchers focused on a practice known as “kangaroo care,” which has been linked to lower infant mortality and better developmental outcomes for vulnerable babies. Kangaroo care includes skin-to-skin contact between the newborn and mother, exclusive breastfeeding, early discharge from the hospital after delivery and close follow-up care at home.

For the current study, researchers examined data on 228 young adults who had been randomly chosen to receive kangaroo care as part of a study done when they were babies. Charpak and her colleagues compared outcomes for these kids to those of 213 young adults from the infant study who didn’t receive kangaroo care.

Babies that received kangaroo care were 61 percent less likely to die during infancy than newborns who didn’t receive this type of care, the researchers report in Pediatrics.

Breastfeeding rates were higher for the kangaroo care babies than the other infants, the study found. In addition, the infants who got kangaroo care had fewer severe infections requiring hospitalization.

It’s possible some of these outcomes might be the result of kangaroo care’s protective effect on the immature brains of preemies, Charpak said by email. This type of care might foster brain development that occurs late in pregnancy for full-term babies but that doesn’t have a chance to happen before premature infants are born.

Another possibility is that parents who provide kangaroo care also nurture children in other ways that are beneficial to health, social and behavioral outcomes, Charpak added.

One limitation of the study is that it doesn’t prove how kangaroo care may benefit babies, only that there are associations between receiving this treatment and several positive health outcomes, the authors note.

Owlet Baby Care Raises $15M in Venture Capital Funding

Owlet Baby Care, the Lehi, Utah-based maker of the Owlet Smart Sock, an infant oxygen and heart rate, raised an additional $15m in venture capital funding.
                 

Backers included Eclipse Ventures and Eniac Ventures, as well as new investors Trilogy Equity Partners, the Amazon Alexa Fund, RTP-HC, Capital Integral and Broadway Angels.

The Techstars company, which has raised $25m in total funding, intends to use the funds to expand its reach into retail and international distribution, launch two new product lines and conduct a large infant health study.

Founded in 2013 by Kurt Workman, CEO, Owlet Baby Care has developed a monitor that tracks a baby’s oxygen and heart rate. Using pulse oximetry, the same proven technology used in hospitals, the Owlet Smart Sock is designed to send notifications to the Base Station and via Wi-Fi to a smartphone, if baby’s heart rate or oxygen fall outside a preset range.
As part of this new funding, Owlet has become the commercialization partner on a $1.5m grant from the NIH to further infant health research. This brings the company’s total grants from the NIH to $3 million since 2015.
The company will launch an IRB-approved clinical study in 2017, which will focus on collecting a large set of infant health data to provide clinicians and researchers insights into an infant’s health and wellbeing.
Also in 2017, Owlet will release a connected care feature giving users access to their data and the ability to share that data with pediatricians.

Childcare workers say infant care is biggest need

New mom Julia Fuentes says she got lucky finding a child-care center with an available place for her 9-month-old daughter, Penelope.
           

Many child-care centers in the Brazosport area are at capacity when it comes to infants, including some with a year-long wait-list.

Some parents will come to the center saying they just found out they’re pregnant and want to put their child on the list, which can have a wait time of up to a year, Assistant Director Cindy Ward said.

The wait-list is long enough to fill a whole other child-care center, Ward said.

“There’s a huge need,” Ward said. “It’s really disheartening to say, ‘I’m sorry there’s no room.’ We’re in need of new centers in the area.”

Donna Kenney, director of the Big Kids site for Children’s Garden in Lake Jackson, said the biggest need is for infants and toddlers.

The state’s Department of Family and Protective Services also requires a specific number of caregivers per age group. There can only be four infants to one teacher, for instance, but there can be up to nine 1-year-olds per teacher, DeLaGarza said.

Infants require more care than an older child, she said.

“Most everyone here that I have came from another day care, and that says a lot too because it’s like they didn’t have options,” she said. “It’s pretty sad because these people have to work, and if they’re going to work everyday not happy, that makes for a miserable day for them.”

While major industries, such as, Dow Chemical Co., BASF Corp. and Freeport LNG have grown, Ward believes the need for child care isn’t any worse than when she started working at the center nine years ago.

The center also is the only facility in the area to be accredited by the National Association for the Education of Young Children. The accredited center means the ratio of children to teachers is lower compared to other child-care facilities, Ward said.

The center caters to a mixture of college students, faculty and residents. It has about 80 children between the ages of 6 weeks and 6 years.

Single men in Japan are signing up for baby care classes

Masaya Kurita, a 31-year-old bachelor living in Tokyo, cradles a plastic baby, gives it a gentle wash in a small basin, and places it back down on a neatly folded towel.

He has no partner and no baby on the way, but has opted into a male-only 'ikumen' - or child-rearing - course, hoping it will better his chances in finding a life-long partner.

The course on Sunday (September 18) was organised by Osaka-based company, Ikumen University, with the explicit aim of helping bachelors actively seeking partners portray themselves as marriage-worthy. Ikumen is a term that combines the word 'men' with 'iku', which means 'nurture' in Japanese.

The course involves learning how to bathe and dress a baby, as well as how to - what the course organisers say - understand a woman's perspective on child-rearing through exercises such as wearing a seven kilogram pregnancy jacket, the company says.

On top of that, data published by the Ministry of Labor showed that men who did tie the knot rarely took paternity leave, tipping much of the burden of child-rearing onto women.

Only 2.65 per cent of men took paternity leave in Japan during the fiscal year of 2015, a far cry from Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's goal of 13 per cent by 2020.

Moms whose infants died in day care petition for 6 months parental leave

A mother who lost her 15-week-old baby on the first day of day care wants to hear more from Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton on parental leave.

Amber Scorah took three months maternity leave after her son was born last year. Even though her work’s leave policy is more generous than many other employers, Scorah didn’t feel like three months was enough time off. She struggled leaving baby Karl, even asking her employer if it was possible to take more time off. It wasn't if she wanted to keep her job. So, like most working moms in America, she took him to day care. When she went back at lunch to check on her son, he was dead. You might have read her heartbreaking story on a New York Times parenting blog last winter.

"I saw my son unconscious, splayed out on a soft changing table. His lips and the area around his mouth were blue, and the day-care owner was performing CPR on him, incorrectly," she wrote in the article.

The cause of death was inconclusive.

Ali Dodd’s story isn’t much different than Scorah's. Dodd’s son, Shepard, suffocated in a car seat when a childcare worker didn’t check on him. It was his sixth day at the day care. He was “still too little to lift up his own head,” she said. Dodd didn't get any paid leave off. Shepard went to day care at barely 11-weeks-old.