The History of Kangaroo Mother Care
Since ancient times in different cultures and continents, mothers, responding to different needs, have hold their babies to be able to do different activities.
Taking up this practice and responding to the real problem of high infant mortality, it was created the KMC under the slogan: “Love, warm and breast milk”.
There are records of the invention of the KMC since 1978 in a Colombian institution (Instituto Materno Infantil) where overcrowding due to lack of technological resources, death for intra-hospital infection and the abandonment of newborns, led to Dr. Edgar Rey Sanabria, (Professor of Neonatology at Departament of Paediatry - Universidad Nacional de Colombia) to think about the physiology of premature or low birth weight babies and use their own mothers turning them into human incubators able to maintain the body temperature of infants and trained in breastfeeding and the care of their babies before leaving the hospital.
After being invented, scientific researches were done to give support to this practice. Many groups worldwide have published the progress, findings and improvements of the KMC. The most representative is a group of Colombians of the “Fundación Canguro” that led the first case – control study to demonstrate the benefits of the method, and in that study published in 1994 were dimensioned the benefits, not only for growth but to the psychosocial and emotional development of the children and the positive effects of this on their parents and family environment.
The existent technology has incorporated the initial philosophy represented in the KMC as a complement in the care of the newborn, where the family is protagonist and where it is incorporated the “love” of all the family, the “warm” of its members and the “breast milk” of the mother when possible and otherwise provide external calories and nutrients without interrupting the breastfeeding, the best food for the baby.
The KMC was intended to apply to children of low birth weight or preemies. However, it has been proven the usefulness of the skin to skin contact also in full term babies that, although they don’t tolerate the kangaroo position for long periods, periods of an hour are enough to promote the bond and neuron sensory development.
Several researches have also shown that neurological and sensory development of preemies may be lower or poor compared with that of the full term babies and that is why the KMC intervention is so important to promote neurodevelopment and somatic growth.
