About Lullaby Massage
Studies show that massage helps children relax. This helps them settle down peacefully at bedtime, regulate emotions, improve concentration, and cope with stressors that trigger anxiety, discomfort, and irritability.
Massage also nurtures the parent-child relationship, encourages bonding, and helps families deal with attachment issues.
Importantly, these benefits come without risk of negative side effects.
How and why
Lullaby Massage works:
Children’s enjoyment of massage is enriched by combining massage with poetry
Lullaby Massage taps the "rhyme-and-touch" technique, whereby each massage technique is accompanied by a poem. So, in addition to sensing the warm touch of a caring parent’s hands, children are comforted by the sound of a parent’s voice. For children who comprehend spoken language, the interaction is enhanced further by the meaning that each poem expresses.
Parents' experience is simplified and enhanced
The poems also help parents by including phrases that communicate simple how-to instructions. Alongside superb illustrations, that are both artistic and informative, the phrases reduce the need for parents to read complicated directions, count strokes, watch the clock, and figure out what to do next. Freed up in this way, parents are able to focus on their children and even gain enjoyment from an interaction that serves, not only as a parenting strategy, but also as a source of harmony.
Lullaby Massage is sequenced so that it fosters unwinding, from playtime to downtime, and nurtures bonding along the way
Lullaby Massage starts with massage strokes that are done while children face forward so they can see their parents. As they watch mom or dad recite the poems and administer massage to the hands, feet, arms, and legs, children have time to become comfortable with massage and gradually they begin to feel calm. As they start to unwind, the traditional downward-facing position is adopted. From this point onward, children are soothed by relaxing massage strokes for the shoulders and back and by words that express tenderness and togetherness.
