Well...
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The real beauty of kangaroo mother care is found in its simplicity and its effectiveness.
There are three steps in this method of caring for mother and baby after child birth.
Simply, the use of skin to skin contact as an incubator, exclusive breastfeeding and the treatment of mother and baby as a whole, are the essential steps in kangaroo mother care.
These basic practices of parenting provide a healthy environment for the growth and development of newborns while they are in a very vulnerable state.
When a baby is born preterm or with low birth weight, there is a period that the baby is required to be kept warm, because it cannot produce enough body heat.
Additionally, they are very susceptible to viruses and bacteria.
This incubation period was typically spent in a hospital incubator, surrounded by potential diseases.
If the mother is able to provide incubation for the child through skin to skin contact, when wrapped to the mother's chest, they can leave the hospital quickly and return home.
KMC can prevent infant death associated with infection and other diseases contracted after child birth.
Breast milk is the best possible food source for newborn babies and infants.
In kangaroo mother care, exclusive breastfeeding is essential to nourishment and bonding.
Breastfeeding provides all the nutrients an infant needs to thrive, while giving the mother a boost in hormones and stabilizing her anxiety or depression associated with child birth.
With the newborn baby wrapped to the mother's chest, it is within close proximity to the breasts and able to nurse more frequently.
Breast milk, in addition to being the most nourishing form of sustenance, is completely cost free.
This becomes a highly valuable factor in struggling regions of the world.
So what is kangaroo mother care.
One important aspect is that when the mother or the infant become ill, or require additional treatment after child birth, it is important to keep them together.
Separating an infant from its mother has been shown to decrease its ability to thrive.
While wrapped to her chest, the infant is transported back to a womb-like environment that is comfortable and familiar.
There is a drastic reduction in stress, in both the mother and the newborn, when they are kept together.
Stress can be an inhibiting factor in recovery of almost any ailment.
By treating the two parts as a whole being, practitioners have been able to facilitate successful recoveries.
These simple steps are making drastic changes in infant mortality rates across the globe.
Kangaroo mother care's success stems from its cost effectiveness and its simplistic and natural approach to solving a very troublesome problem.
In areas like Malawi, they experience a 20% infant mortality rate due to a lack of available resources to manage child birth successfully.
Now, they are seeing results as kangaroo mother care becomes accepted as a postpartum care practice.
As more expecting mothers learn this instinctual form of parenting, we can expect a continued decrease in newborn death.