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- Renowned anthropologist, Ashley Montagu, wrote about how newborns are actually born immature. We actually need 18 months of gestation to be fully developed. The first 9 months of an infant's development in the mother's womb, is referred to as "uterogestation" and is followed by an equally important period of continued, rapid development, referred to as "exterogestation". The 9 months following a newborn's birth is the time when the baby grows so rapidly that the brain size doubles and the body weight triples, but the baby's head would be too large to pass through the birth canal. For this reason we humans have evolved (or been designed) to be born 9 months early. The period of "exterogestation" lasts until the baby is crawling.

Most mammals are mobile at birth and able to follow the mother closely. Our newborns are immobile and need to be carried and kept close to the mother, ideally at all times. Babywearing is the method for creating an "external womb" for the infant to complete his "exterogestation". Kinesthetic stimulation, movement and touch, play a very important role in proper brain development. Many of the modern baby care products interfere with this needed stimuli, by separating the baby from the mom and placing baby in a carrier, be it a exersaucer, swing, bouncy seat or the like, which does not have all the stimuli an infant would be exposed to if just carried in a baby sling carrier. And, what is worthwhile mentioning is the irony, that these products are designed to provide some of the stimuli, such as rocking, visual or auditory stimuli, that the baby needs, to free mom's hands to do other things. Meanwhile, use of a baby carrier creates an environment rich in kinesthetic stimuli, thereby supporting the normal infant development, as well as freeing mom's hands to do other things. Definitely a win-win situation.

Keeping the baby in-arms, be it with or without a baby carrier, creates an environment where the baby is experiencing constant movement, keeping the baby where he/she can see the mom's face up close, hear her heartbeat and voice, feel her warmth and smell her milk, encouraging breastfeeding, all of which is known to be very important for a baby to thrive.

- Drs Edgar Rey and Hector Martinez first discovered the power of skin-to-skin contact when parents wore their premature babies, like kangaroos carry their newborns, against their chests. Thus named "Kangaroo Care", the neonatologists found that premature babies thrived when they received this skin-to-skin contact. This serves to support the overall claims about how important touch and closeness are, not just for premature babies, but for all babies.
http://www.prematurity.org/baby/kangaroo.html

- Dr. Harry F. Harlow demonstrated with his Cloth Monkey / Wire Monkey surrogates, how a baby monkey preferred the touch of cloth monkey, which more closely resembled a real monkey, to a wire monkey, even when both food and warmth were provided by the wire monkey. Dr. Harlow's experiments demonstrated "the need for affection created a stronger bond between mother and infant than did physical needs (food)." http://www.a2zpsychology.com/great_psychologists/HARLOW.HTM

Babywearing promotes mother-child bonding, as well as supplying the natural tactile stimulation a baby instinctually craves.

Benefits of Babywearing

- Babywearing is one of the 5 B's of Attachment Parenting touted by Dr. Sears.

- Babywearing allows mom (or another caregiver) to have her hands free to do other things, while keeping her baby close.

- Babywearing has been around as long as babies have been around. It's an important and useful babyrearing tool that was almost a lost art, fortunately is becoming popular again.

- Babywearing fosters the bond between mom and baby. Mothers who wear their babies report that they feel more confident in reading their babies' body language. This was also documented in the case of mothers of premature babies who practiced "Kangaroo Care", these moms reported feeling significantly more confident in caring for their sickly babies.

- Babywearing encourages more direct social interaction than having the baby sitting in a car seat or stroller, because he/she is up at face level. You will notice that not only do you end up speaking directly to your baby more, which supports both verbal and social development, but other people do as well.

- Babywearing supports the proper development of the inner ear, because of the 3-D movements, up-down, side-side, front-back. A baby being worn on your back will have much more movement, stimulating the inner ear, than sitting in a carseat, that rocks back & forth only when mom rocks it, or a stroller which has the front-back movement only.

- Babywearing supports optimal development in babies, with premature babies a special way to babywear has been given the name "Kangaroo Care". Discovered in S. America out of necessity, because the hospitals didn't have enough incubators for premature babies and so the doctors had the mothers wear their babies skin to skin between their breasts, to provide warmth. What they found was that the babies that were worn in this manner thrived much better than the babies who were kept in the incubators. The worn babies breastfed more often, gained more weight and their breathing and heart rates were better regulated as well! This was just for premature babies, fully developed babies also benefit for the same reasons, it's just that their lives are not in danger like their premature counterparts were.