If your life’s purpose has evaded you thus far, rest easy, because you may have just found it: You can now volunteer to snuggle newborns in desperate need of love and care — those suffering through withdrawal, after being born with drug addictions.
According to the National Institute of Drug Abuse, a baby is born every 25 minutes suffering from opioid withdrawal — or neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS) — as the result of being exposed in utero to illegal or prescription drugs by their mothers. In many cases, drug-addicted women who fall pregnant are given opioids such as methadone in order to do less harm to their developing fetuses than harder drugs such as crack or heroin might; although profound damage can be inflicted either way. But on top of their babies’ suffering, new mothers undergoing the torment of withdrawal are often absent during the weeks or months that their babies are going through their own withdrawal symptoms — crying, refusing to eat, shaking, and even vomiting.
The dramatic increase in these heartbreaking cases over the last few years — particularly in rural America — has left clinics and hospital neonatal intensive care units in dire need of extra assistance. And new programs being set up in hospitals from Texas to California to Illinois to Pennsylvania are dedicated to making sure they get it.
While doctors and nurses do critical work in the NICU on behalf of addicted infants, volunteer snugglers at hospitals like the Woman’s Hospital of Texas perform the essential task of tending to the babies emotionally during their hospital stays. Babies who are just days and weeks old get hugged, kissed, soothed, swaddled, sung to, and held during by volunteers who have been specially trained to give just the right type of tender loving care.
While hospital staffers don’t have volunteer cuddlers change diapers or do feedings, the relief they provide doctors and nurses is still considerable. And it’s not always sweet nothings that babies need, either. Since they aren’t old enough to know how to soothe themselves, it can be a firm embrace or a steady voice that does the trick as babies in despair have their methadone doses decreased.
Philly.com reports that volunteer cuddlers have been around since the late 1980s, when it became evident that crack-addicted babies needed extra attention. And the snuggly help they received quickly paid off: Babies receiving care from cuddle volunteers gained weight faster, required less medication, and got out of the hospital sooner.
In addition to alleviating some of the added pressure on hospital staff in the NICU, volunteer cuddlers “often serve as ambassadors to parents,” volunteer Jane Cavanaugh told Philly.com.
“Sometimes the moms feel stigmatized,” she continued. “They feel the nurses are judging them.”
“When I see the parents,” another volunteer said, “I say, ‘Oh, what a beautiful baby,’ and ‘Congratulations.’ They’re doing the best they can.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that the number of newborns born addicted to drugs has become an epidemic, increasing by nearly 400% since the year 2000. A new report from the Journal of the American Medical Association also found that the economic impact of caring for NAS-afflicted babies has increased by more than a quarter of a billion dollars over the past several years. While Medicaid covers a significant amount of the cost to care for infants, rural areas that tend to see bigger numbers of addicts can have a harder time paying for the remainder of the highly specialized care needed to wean babies during recovery.
Good Housekeeping writes that while not every hospital has a cuddling program, people who want to help should check in with women and children’s shelters in their communities to see if they can work with families of moms battling addiction.