Mother's Voice Helps Premature Babies

Hearing their mother's voice helps premature infants gain strength and learn how to feed, according to a recent study.

The study, published in a recent issue of Pediatrics took a look at how hearing their mother's voice can help premature infants gain strength and develop healthy behaviors. The behavior of feeding, for instance, is one of the main reasons premature babies have to stay in a hospital for an extended period of time after birth. Infants born prematurely often lack the strength and coordination to nurse from their mothers properly and have to be kept in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) where they can be fed through a feeding tube.

While in the NICU, nurses often give babies pacifiers to help them practice actions necessary for learning how to feed from their mothers properly. What doctors are now learning is that a recording of the baby's mother's voice can also help speed up the strengthening and learning process, getting a premature infant home sooner.

To come to this conclusion, the researchers studied 100 infants born between 34 and 36 weeks of development -- which means these babies were a maximum of five weeks prematurely born. All infant subjects of the study were relying primarily on a feeding tube at the start of the study, and lacked the strength and behavioral cues needed to leave the NICU.

Half the infants were exposed to an environment typical to your standard NICU, complete with normal pacifiers, skin-to-skin contact act, and a gradual introduction to breast-feeding.

The other half of the infant's were exposed to the same environment plus five daily 15-minute sessions with a specially designed pacifier that would play a recording of their mother's voice when they sucked.

According to the study results, infants in both groups gained about the same amount of weight over five days, but those with the special pacifier displayed a larger appetite, taking in nearly twice the fortified breast milk from the feeding tubes, compared to the normal pacifier group. The special pacifier group also showed an aptitude to feed without a tube nearly 50 percent more often.

The research team claims that this indicates that hearing their mother's voice when they suck properly helps premature infants develop healthy feeding habits.

This study reinforces the age-old idea that parents should sing and talk to their baby as much as possible, because exposure to more stimulus at a young age will help them develop into intelligent and healthy children.

The study was published in Pediatrics on February 17.

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