Nourishing and healing scents for baby
A baby's sense of smell is already active at birth and helps him recognise his parents. As he grows, baby will use his sense of smell to develop his taste for different foods as well as to imprint his unconscious mind with emotional memories triggered by different scents. For your baby, scent can taste, feel and heal.
Nourishing scents for baby
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Tasting new foods is one of baby’s most important sensorial experiences around the age of 6 months old and his sense of smell plays an essential role.
When you place a spoonful of pureed food into your baby’s mouth, his taste buds react and send a number of messages to the brain. The tip of the tongue is covered in taste buds that recognise sweet tastes; the side taste buds recognise salty and acidic foods and the back taste buds recognise bitter tastes. But even before the food has reached baby’s mouth, the air is filled with food molecules that enter the nostrils and stimulate his sense of smell.
Our sense of smell is 10,000 more sensitive than our sense of taste; it can distinguish up to 2,000 chemical compounds that we define as “odours”. Taste only recognises basic flavours: sweet, salty, bitter and acidic. Knowing how to differentiate and appreciate the rich complexity of a flavour requires “joint” work between nose and mouth. For example, to recognise a raspberry, the tongue identifies the sweet and acidic taste, but it’s the nose that recognises what fruit it actually is by its odour.
Odours and baby's emotions
Our sense of smell also has another skill that no other of the five senses has: the ability to remind us of certain memories, as well as the emotions felt at the time. A smell can unexpectedly trigger an avalanche of images and feelings, often in a very vivid and intense way.
Have you noticed how many children, looking for comfort or company, will go to their favourite object - generally a soft toy – and bring it close to their nose? Often if the soft toy has been washed, the child doesn't seem that interested in it. These are all familiar odours – mum’s smell, dad, teddy bear, bed... – all things that protect a child from the fear of the unknown.
Studies have been carried out to find out whether young children have a preference for certain scents. A variety of studies have shown that strawberry and vanilla are amongst these favourite smells. It’s no surprise that manufacturers use "strawberry flavours" in their products for children: shampoo, toothpaste, and even some toys.
A child will progressively add new scents to his repertoire of favourites: chocolate, orange, etc. It’s important to understand that while a part of our appreciation of odours is innate, another part is cultural and is learnt. That’s why it’s not unusual to find a child playing with his excrement. This is something completely bizarre for an adult who dislikes the smell; the notion of hygiene has been acquired with learning along with the fear of disease.
The influence of sense of smell on behaviour is therefore to be expected. For instance, American psychologist Rachel S. Herz has shown that children lose the ability to resolve intellectual tasks when exposed to “negative” odours.
Healing scents for baby
Your baby is woken by a stuffy nose, she’s so tired but can’t get back to sleep and could do with a stimulating massage... why not give aromatherapy a go. This very ancient healing therapy is used to treat minor complaints, beauty matters and to control emotions.
A few tips:
- Baby is sleeping badly? Prepare a chamomile tea and add it to the bath water.
- Suffering from colic? Soak a piece of cotton in water containing a few drops of pine and orange essential oils - or orange and lavender - place this cotton near the cot, close to a source of heat.
In Daniele Ryman’s book Aromatherapy, she tells of the day she was born. Her grandfather put peach blossom and lilacs around the house so that she could smell these invigorating scents right from her first day in the world. Celebrating a birth with flowers, waking up under the shade of a linden tree, adding a pinch of rosemary to a dish – these are all ways, without realising, of practising aromatherapy.
Take a few lavender leaves between your fingers and rub them together; you'll be able to smell the essential oils that have been absorbed into your fingers. All essential oils extracted from flowers, fruits, resins or barks have varying degrees of antibiotic, antiseptic, anti-inflammatory and anti-viral properties. These essential oils are extracted by distillation from plants. They are then added in small doses to body oils, bath water or are used for inhalation or infusions.
Copyright © 2011 Doctissimo
Posted 05.01.2011
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