Parent-Infant Interaction and Physical load of Carrying Movement while Parents Carry Their Infants in Arms or Piggyback

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This study discussed the meaning of baby-carrying style of nowadays and attempted to clarify the movement characteristics of carrying style and the physical load for parents while carrying their infants in their arms or piggyback. The study showed that : (1) To carry a baby on the back with a carrier seems to have been mare useful than to carry a baby in the arms because mothers have been able to engage in both baby-care and housework by employing the piggyback style.(2) Fathers sometimes carry their infants on their chest with one arm or carry them piggyback without using a carrier in their leisure time. However, parents have to use both their arms to support their babies or toddlers firmly when the infants fall asleep or the young infants cannot support their position by themselves.(3) Among the parents who carried their infants on their chest using both of their arms, more than half of them carried them in a face-to-face position, others showed a face-to-side position (38%) or face- … More to-back position (4.6%).(4) When an experiment was conducted using a baby-dummy (66cm, 7.5kg), subjects (female students) showed a tendency to carry the dummy on the chest placed their arms in a parallel pattern around the dummy to support it firmly. The subjects stood leaning backward slightly when they hold the dummy on the chest. Compared with the standing posture without carrying anything, the neck flexion increased but the lumbar flexion angle was almost the same.(5) When the subjects kept standing carrying the dummy three minutes, more than half of them changed the carrying style during the term. Although some of the subjects did not change their initial carrying style, almost all of them swayed, lifted up the dummy slightly or patted the back or the haunch of the dummy. The legs of the subjects were observed to rarely move. However, the record of the electromyograms of the right and the left tibialis anterior and gastrocnemius showed continuous and reciprocal contraction. This seems to indicate that the physical load of the baby-carrying style for the legs is considerably bigger than it is estimated by its appearance. Less