Volunteers are signing up to cuddle adorable babies who are born addicted to painkillers or heroin.
The programme in America is designed to help babies who have neonatal abstinence syndrome which means their mum was addicted to drugs such as painkillers, methadone or heroin during their pregnancy. The aim is to help the newborns while they’re going through their withdrawal symptoms such as; vomiting, crying, difficulty sleeping, fevers and diarrhoea.
It can take weeks or months for the babies to fully recover which is why it’s amazing that volunteers are helping out. The children’s parents can’t always spend all day with their children – some mums are doing drug rehabilitation programmes - so the volunteers step in and comfort and soothe the children.
The volunteers may simply hold the babies, sing to them, snuggle them, whisper to them and studies have shown it has been helping the children during their difficult time.
Maryann Malloy, a nurse manager for the neonatal intensive care unit at Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia, has spoken about how the programme is beneficial for the babies: "These babies need to feel love, human touch and a soft voice to comfort them when they're in pain...
"It makes the parents feel better knowing that even when they cannot be here there is someone to rock and hold their baby."
"It is a helpless feeling when these babies become inconsolable. Our cuddlers help so the babies do not reach that point. They pick them up before the first whimper."
How adorable and what an incredible thing to help out with.
This isn’t the first time this programme has been used back in the 1980s some organisations did the same thing to help vulnerable children.
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