"Kangaroo Mothers" and the Power of Touch
In the early 1980s, two pediatricians in Bogota, Colombia, made waves around the world for a new method of caring for premature babies. The method, called Kangaroo Care, was so named because of how it resembles marsupial caregiving: A mother snuggles her baby, upright, against her bare chest for long periods of time.
The doctors developed the program in 1979 at the Instituto Materno Infantil at San Juan de Dios Hospital in Bogota. This large maternity hospital was overcrowded and understaffed and underfunded: In the special baby care unit, several babies would often share the same incubator. Infection rates were sky-high, as were abandonment rates and death rates.
To improve this dire situation, doctors Edgar Rey and Hector Martinez launched a program to get babies out of the hospital — and its germs — as soon as they were physically stable, even if they were still very small. They advised mothers to keep their baby on their chest for warmth, and to exclusively breast feed.
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