Body Work for babies

Bodies are made up of many different components—skin, hair, muscles, blood vessels, nerves, bones, organs (to name a few)—and fascia lives between them all.

Fascia is the thin white membrane that you can peel off a chicken breast. It is woven throughout our bodies and helps hold us together.

When it’s smooth, fascia enables our muscles to glide easily; our nerves to fire quickly; our bodies to move freely.

When it’s crinkled, movements are restricted, slow, and use more energy. When movement is restricted, we start to use extra muscles in an attempt to create normal movement but the extra muscles weren’t meant todo the hard work and they quickly tire out.

For babies, crinkly fascia can translate to poor feeding, body tension, and often a fussy baby.

Myofascial release uses gently hand movements to encourage the fascia to straighten out and allow everything to flow with more ease.

CST tends to focus more on encouraging the fluid in the spine to flow rhythmically and steadily which allows nerves to fire at top speed, blood to flow quickly, and muscles to move without excessive effort.

Similar to MFR, CST uses gentle techniques to encourage the body to move with ease. Often babies will help with the process, adjusting their position to allow access to up areas of their body as if showing where they want to be worked on.

Babies are born with certain responses that happen automatically without them having to think about it. The early Primitive reflexes allow babies to move themselves into position to exit the womb, crawl the to breast after birth, and latch on their own. 

Feeding reflexes allow babies to latch painlessly and drink milk efficiently. Sometimes these reflexes aren’t working properly or work better on one side of the body than the other which creates problems with latching and movement. 

As babies age, new reflexes emerge to allow them to roll, crawl, and eventually walk and other reflexes go to sleep, or integrate.

If reflexes aren’t waking up or going to sleep at the right time, motor development can be impaired or delayed. Reflexes can reactivate after integration which can also cause issues.

Reflex integration therapy uses small repetitive motions to turn the appropriate reflexes on/off or turn the volume up on one side of the body to improve latch and overall body movements.

• Latch pain

• Difficulty looking both directions equally

• Being comfortable at rest

• Relaxing babies who seem to be on edge all the time

• Excessive spitting up/reflux

• Rolling over too soon or too late

• Not opening mouth wide to eat

• Only latching in certain positions

• Difficulty bringing hands to mouth

• Atypical crawling patterns

• Head shape