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Recommended by Vimala

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Vimala McClure founded The International Association of Infant Massage (IAIM) in 1986.

You can learn more about Vimala and IAIM on the IAIM site here.

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  • 05/07/2018 2:00 PM | Infant Massage USA (Administrator)

    A study by the University of Iowa and Indiana University found that how a parent responds to baby’s “babbling” can shape the way babies communicate and use vocalization. Researchers  say that parents who consciously engage with their infants can accelerate their children’s language learning. The currently held belief is that human communication is innate and can’t be influenced by parental feedback.

    What researchers found is that infants whose mothers responded to what they thought their babies were saying showed an increase in developmentally advanced -vocalizations, which means the babbling has become sophisticated enough to sound like words. The babies also began directing more of their communication toward their mothers.

    Infants whose mothers did not try as much to understand them and directed their infants’ attention to something else did not show the same rate of growth in their language and communication skills. The difference was that mothers who engaged with their babies when they babbled let their babies know they could communicate. Consequently, those babies turned more often to their mothers and babbled. 

    This is great news, but no news to most parents who massage their infants. In our classes, instructors encourage parents to respond to their babies, and parents use the time when babies are most concentrated while receiving their massage to sing a lullaby that is rhythmically in tune with massage strokes. Infant massage is a time when parents are focused on listening to their babies, engaged with their communication, both when it is vocal and when babies are communicating with “body language.” Even when a baby is crying, you can speak to him, letting the baby know that you understand what he is “saying.” The more parents practice engaging with their babies’ vocalizations, the better they get at understanding them, and the more babies relax and feel understood.

    Especially with my first child, I was uber-engaged with him. I was developing my Infant Massage course and paid special attention to what he was “saying,” and I responded, giving back what I thought he was communicating. He was speaking in sentences by nine months of age, reading by age three.


    By Vimala McClure

    Information on the original study can be found here

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