Holding Your Baby Skin-to-Skin Really Does Ease the Pain of Needles

What a large 2025 review of 29 studies found about kangaroo care, sweet drops, breastfeeding, and swaddling for a newborn's procedure pain

Holding a newborn against your bare chest — often called skin-to-skin or "kangaroo" care — measurably reduces the pain babies feel during routine medical procedures like heel-pricks, blood draws, and vaccinations. A 2025 review that combined the results of 29 separate studies involving nearly 3,000 babies found that skin-to-skin contact eases procedure pain far better than doing nothing, works about as well as the sweet-tasting sugar drops nurses commonly use, works better than swaddling, and is very slightly less effective than breastfeeding during the procedure. In short, a parent's chest is one of the most powerful and gentle painkillers a newborn has [1].

Why this question matters — and how families used to face it

It is hard for many parents to learn that, not so long ago, doctors believed newborns barely felt pain. Because tiny babies cannot say "that hurts," and because their nervous systems looked immature, procedures were often done with no comfort measures at all. That belief was finally overturned in the 1980s, when careful research showed that newborns — especially those born early — genuinely do feel pain, and may even feel it more sharply because the body's natural "pain brakes" have not fully developed yet [2]. That discovery created a new problem for families and clinicians: strong pain medicines like opioids are too risky to use for a quick heel-prick, so what could safely comfort a baby instead? Over the years, hospitals turned to gentle, drug-free methods — a few drops of sugar water on the tongue, breastfeeding, snug swaddling, letting the baby suck on a pacifier, and skin-to-skin holding. Skin-to-skin care was already known to help babies stay warm, bond with their parents, and even survive when born very small, but researchers increasingly noticed it also seemed to calm babies during painful moments. For a long time, though, studies mostly compared skin-to-skin against doing nothing, so no one had clearly answered a very practical question: if several soothing options exist, which should parents and nurses choose first [3]?

What the researchers did

A team of researchers gathered every high-quality study they could find — 29 carefully designed trials, all of which randomly assigned babies to different comfort methods so the comparison would be fair. Together these studies included 2,995 newborns, both full-term and premature. The researchers used established "pain scores," which trained observers calculate by watching a baby's facial expressions, crying, body movements, and vital signs like heart rate. By pooling all the results, they could see not just whether skin-to-skin helps, but how it stacks up against the other common options [1]. Scientists think skin-to-skin works because the close contact lowers stress hormones, releases the body's own natural soothing chemicals, and steadies the baby's heartbeat and breathing during the scary, painful moment [4].

What they found

The clearest result was that skin-to-skin contact strongly reduced pain compared with no comfort measure — a large, meaningful difference that held true for both premature and full-term babies [1]. When compared head-to-head with the other methods, a helpful ranking emerged. Skin-to-skin and sweet sugar solutions worked about equally well, so one can stand in for the other depending on what is easiest at the time — a finding that matches earlier studies comparing kangaroo care with sugar drops [5]. Skin-to-skin clearly beat swaddling. And breastfeeding during the procedure came out slightly ahead of skin-to-skin alone, which fits with earlier research showing that breastfeeding and skin-to-skin together are especially soothing [6]. The timing mattered too: the comfort worked best when the baby was already on the parent's chest during and right after the procedure, rather than being placed there only afterward.

These pain-relieving effects sit alongside skin-to-skin's other well-known benefits. Large studies have shown kangaroo care helps the smallest babies survive and lowers their risk of serious complications [7], and reviews confirm it also helps steady a baby's heart rate and breathing [8]. In other words, the same simple act that helps a fragile baby grow stronger also helps that baby hurt less.

What this means for your family

If your baby needs a heel-prick, blood test, or vaccination, you can ask to hold them skin-to-skin during the procedure — and it helps to get settled 15 to 30 minutes beforehand so the calming effect is already working when the needle happens. For a breastfeeding, full-term baby, feeding at the breast during the procedure is an especially good option, and combining it with skin-to-skin may be better still. If holding is not possible in the moment, the sugar-water drops that nurses offer are a reasonable and roughly equal substitute. What you should take away is that these are real, evidence-based ways to comfort your baby, and that you are not a bystander — your body is part of the treatment. Many parents find that turning an anxious moment into one where they are actively soothing their child makes the experience easier for everyone.

It can help to know what this looks like in practice. Skin-to-skin usually means your baby, wearing only a diaper (and sometimes a little hat), is placed upright against your bare chest and covered with a blanket for warmth, with their head turned so you can see their face. Nurses can perform a heel-prick or give a vaccination while your baby stays nestled there; many parents find it reassuring that they do not have to hand their baby over during the uncomfortable part. If you are recovering from a cesarean or are otherwise unable to hold your baby, the other parent's chest works too — the benefit comes from the calm, close contact itself, not from who provides it. Some hospitals will also offer a few drops of sugar water at the same time, and combining comfort methods is generally thought to help even more; one careful study, for example, directly compared holding a premature baby skin-to-skin against giving sugar solution and found both eased pain well [5]. None of these steps require special equipment or add meaningful time, and they can be built into the normal routine of a blood test or shot.

A gentle reminder for parents of babies in intensive care: even very small, fragile infants benefit, and the research found the pain relief was just as real for premature babies as for those born at term [1]. If your baby is attached to monitors or lines, the NICU team can help you get positioned safely, and holding your baby this way often steadies their heart rate and breathing during the procedure as an added bonus.

It is worth being honest about the limits, too. The studies varied a lot in how they were run, and many were small or hard to conduct perfectly, partly because you cannot "hide" from an observer whether a baby is being held by a parent [9]. Because of this, experts rate the overall strength of the evidence as moderate at best, and skin-to-skin will not erase pain entirely. But it is safe, free, requires no equipment, and brings a bundle of other benefits — so there is every reason to use it, and pain scientists have spent decades developing the careful tools needed to measure just how much it helps [10].

What researchers are working on next

The next questions are practical ones. Researchers want to test whether combining methods — skin-to-skin plus sugar drops, or skin-to-skin plus breastfeeding — works even better than any single approach, and they are calling for larger, more rigorous studies with clearer, more consistent methods [11]. They also hope to build simple bedside guides that tell nurses and parents exactly which comfort measure to reach for in different situations — the delivery room, the newborn nursery, or the intensive care unit. Until then, the message for families is reassuring and clear: your embrace genuinely helps, and you can ask for it every time.

References

  1. Teles LDA, Arcanjo FPN, Cardoso KM, Justino JDS, et al. Impact of skin-to-skin contact on acute procedural pain in newborns: a systematic review and meta-analysis. J Pediatr (Rio J). 2025;101(6):101442. doi:10.1016/j.jped.2025.101442 ↩
  2. Anand KJS, Hickey PR. Pain and its effects in the human neonate and fetus. N Engl J Med. 1987;317(21):1321-9. doi:10.1056/NEJM198711193172105 ↩
  3. Johnston C, Campbell-Yeo M, Disher T, et al. Skin-to-skin care for procedural pain in neonates. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2017;2(2):CD008435. doi:10.1002/14651858.CD008435.pub3 ↩
  4. Pavlyshyn H, Sarapuk I. Skin-to-skin contact — an effective intervention on pain and stress reduction in preterm infants. Front Pediatr. 2023;11:1148946. doi:10.3389/fped.2023.1148946 ↩
  5. Chermont AG, Falcão LFM, de Souza Silva EHL, et al. Skin-to-skin contact and/or oral 25% dextrose for procedural pain relief for term newborn infants. Pediatrics. 2009;124(6):e1101-7. doi:10.1542/peds.2009-0993 ↩
  6. Marín Gabriel MÁ, del Rey Hurtado de Mendoza B, Jiménez Figueroa L, et al. Analgesia with breastfeeding in addition to skin-to-skin contact during heel prick. Arch Dis Child Fetal Neonatal Ed. 2013;98(6):F499-503. doi:10.1136/archdischild-2012-302921 ↩
  7. WHO Immediate KMC Study Group. Immediate "kangaroo mother care" and survival of infants with low birth weight. N Engl J Med. 2021;384(21):2028-38. doi:10.1056/NEJMoa2026486 ↩
  8. Durmaz A, Sezici E, Akkaya DD. The effect of kangaroo mother care or skin-to-skin contact on infant vital signs: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Midwifery. 2023;125:103771. doi:10.1016/j.midw.2023.103771 ↩
  9. Sterne JAC, Savović J, Page MJ, et al. RoB 2: a revised tool for assessing risk of bias in randomised trials. BMJ. 2019;366:l4898. doi:10.1136/bmj.l4898 ↩
  10. Maxwell LG, Fraga MV, Malavolta CP. Assessment of pain in the newborn: an update. Clin Perinatol. 2019;46(4):693-707. doi:10.1016/j.clp.2019.08.005 ↩
  11. Conde-Agudelo A, Díaz-Rossello JL. Kangaroo mother care to reduce morbidity and mortality in low birthweight infants. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2016;2016(8):CD002771. doi:10.1002/14651858.CD002771.pub4 ↩