When a scan shows that a baby has a condition that cannot be cured, families face a stretch of pregnancy that nothing prepares them for. Perinatal palliative care exists for exactly that stretch: support for the baby, the parents, and the wider family before birth, during birth, and afterwards…

Parents whose baby arrives many weeks early often carry a question that reaches far beyond the neonatal unit: will my child grow up to be happy? A long-running Australian study has now followed the same group of young people from early childhood into their twenties, asking carefully and repeatedly…

Doctors in Toronto wanted to find a kinder way to ease the pain premature babies feel when a long IV line is placed into a vein, so they tested a painkiller sprayed into the nose instead of given by needle. Their small study set out to enrol 24 babies but reached only 8, mostly because these…

Having a baby in neonatal intensive care is one of the hardest things a parent can go through, and anxiety, low mood and stress are common among these families. Three new studies asked what actually helps: support given by staff in hospital worked well, and so did teaching parents to use touch…

Researchers asked 409 parents of premature babies, on the very day their baby was discharged from a newborn intensive care unit, how good the hospital's teaching had been and how ready they felt to care for their child. Parents who rated the teaching more highly did feel more capable — and part of…

Newborn babies need small blood tests in their first days, and the most common one is the "heel prick" — a quick lance to the heel to collect a few drops of blood. It is brief, but it does hurt. A 2025 research review gathered the best trials on drug-free ways to comfort babies during this…

A small study from Japan found that playing a recording of a parent singing helped premature babies breathe a little more calmly. Babies who listened to their own parent's recorded song for 30 minutes a day showed a modest, measurable drop in how fast they were breathing, and a very slight rise in…

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…

Many parents leave the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) with a healthy baby but a lingering fear that their child is fragile — a fear that can quietly shape years of parenting. A team of researchers in Dallas tested whether five sessions of a structured talking therapy, given around the time a…