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Your assignment is to prepare and submit a paper on paradigm of kangaroo care in the preterm neonate

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Your assignment is to prepare and submit a paper on paradigm of kangaroo care in the preterm neonate. Anthropological evidence and normal human behavior suggest that newborns and babies should be in constant contact with the mother and exclusively breastfed. “Physiology and research provide overwhelming evidence that Kangaroo Mother Care is not only safe but superior. Kangaroo Care is defined as “intrahospital maternal-infant skin-to-skin contact” (Bergman 2005). “Kangaroo Care originated in Bogotá, Columbia in 1983 by Neos Edgar Rey and Hector Martinez when they developed the “Kangaroo Mother Care” program to decrease the high mortality rate among preemies” (Collard 2007). Dr. Nils Bergman is considered as the propagator of the Kangaroo Mother Care concept, by putting breastfeeding into a biological, evolutionary, and anthropological context after observing commonalities of breastfeeding behavior in all mammals, and defining a paradigm for it. He emphasized that “a paradigm is determined by things such as tradition, culture, and experience more than science or research” (Albright 2001).

Bergman found that all newborn mammals exhibit a sequence of behaviors that leads to initiation of breastfeeding, and calls for care-taking responses from the mother. From an anthropological perspective, it appears that human brain growth at birth is about 25 percent and 80 percent growth is achieved 12 months after birth, which means the human newborn completes its gestational brain growth outside the womb. “It has been suggested that this is an evolutionary compromise to the narrowed pelvic structure of humans as they began walking on two legs” (Albright 2001). In the case of babies born premature, it is an early shift from the natural ‘habitat’ and requires a favorable environment for brain growth. Thus, a comparable and conducive place for such babies is skin-to-skin contact with the mother, like a Kangaroo.

It has also been argued that “care patterns in Western society have been evolved away from “carry care” to one of “cache care,” where the infant is lying still, feedings are scheduled, typical of “nestling care,” and infants are expected to sleep alone” (Albright 2001).&nbsp.