Little Touches IAIM Baby Massage Course
Five beautiful weeks of slowing down, connecting and learning the language of nurturing touch with your baby.
Little Touches is our gentle five-week IAIM Baby Massage course, held in the calm and welcoming surroundings of Katie’s House in East Grinstead.
Those early months with a baby can pass in a blur of feeding, changing, settling, sleeping and trying to work out exactly what your little person needs.Little Touches gives you permission to stop. To put everything else aside for a while, sit with your baby and simply enjoy being together.
So much more than learning how to massage your baby
The International Association of Infant Massage programme is centred around respectful, nurturing touch and communication between babies and their parents or primary caregivers.
Across our five weeks together, you’ll gradually learn a beautiful sequence of massage strokes for your baby’s whole body, building on what you have learnt each week until you have a complete massage routine that you can continue to use long after the course has finished.
But Little Touches isn’t simply about learning a sequence of strokes. It’s about learning to watch, listen and respond to your baby. You’ll begin to recognise their cues, understand when they’re ready for interaction and when they’ve had enough, and discover another beautiful way of communicating with them before they can ever use words.
There is no expectation for your baby to lie quietly and be massaged for an hour. Babies are allowed to be babies here.
They can feed.
They can sleep.
They can cry.
They can need a cuddle.
They can decide they don’t fancy being massaged that day at all.
You can simply watch, learn and try again at home when the moment feels right. Your baby’s needs always come first.
What will we learn?
Over the five weeks, we’ll gently build towards a full-body massage, giving you plenty of opportunity to practise and become confident with each stroke. Alongside massage, the IAIM programme introduces:
- Gentle movements and touch relaxation
- Understanding your baby’s behavioural states and cues
- How to recognise the best time to offer massage
- A specific routine to support babies experiencing colic and digestive discomfort
- Safe and appropriate use of massage oils
- Ways to adapt massage as your baby grows
- The importance of nurturing touch, bonding and communication
The IAIM massage sequence brings together influences from Indian and Swedish massage alongside principles from yoga and reflexology
The beautiful benefits of nurturing touch
Massage can offer something wonderful for both baby and grown-up.
For babies, infant massage may support relaxation, body awareness and coordination, bonding and attachment, and can offer relief from wind, colic, constipation and some of the everyday discomforts of babyhood.
But there is another side to Little Touches that we think is just as important.
It builds your confidence too. As the weeks pass, you begin to know your baby’s little signals. You notice their expressions and movements. You learn when they’re asking for interaction and when they’re telling you they’ve had enough.
You begin to trust yourself. There is something incredibly powerful about having a skill that belongs just to you and your baby.
A little pocket of calm at Katie’s House
Little Touches isn’t a class that we want you to rush into, complete and rush straight back out of again.
Katie’s House was created to feel like a home from home, and our baby massage course reflects that. Our groups are intentionally warm, relaxed and unhurried, with time to talk, meet other parents and share some of the enormous highs, and sometimes the harder partsof those early months.
There is never any judgement about how your baby communicates, how much massage you manage to do or whether you arrive after a particularly chaotic morning.
Come exactly as you are. We’ll take care of the rest.
Our Little Touches IAIM Baby Massage courses run regularly at Katie’s House in East Grinstead but they fill up very quickly, so please do secure a space if you’d like to come along.
Click the BOOKING tab to see our next course and book your space.
