You don't have to tell the parents of a premature baby twice that leaving a newborn in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit is hard. Although the babies need the intensive care to survive, they end up spending the very beginning of their lives in isolation and can develop an aversion to touch (and other developmental issues) as a result. It's extremely painful for parents, especially mothers, to be unable to touch their children after birth.
Yamile Jackson, Ph.D., a mother living in Houston, Texas, felt this heartache when she prematurely gave birth to her son, Zach, 15 years ago. Zach was born 12 weeks early and weighed only two pounds, and Jackson had to leave him in the NICU for 155 days. "Leaving the hospital without your newborn is very difficult," she said in a recent video from Huffington Post Parents. "And I couldn't imagine having my life without touching him."
Determined to be there for her son, Jackson developed a simple yet effective plan: She stuffed a garden glove, slept with it to cover it in her scent and then left it with Zach in the NICU. Even when she couldn't physically be there with him, the glove helped him feel like she was.
Jackson's stuffed glove ended up being a hit with NICU employees. Three weeks after Zach was finally able to come home, a nurse called her to ask if she could make more of the gloves for other babies in the unit — and so the "Zaky" glove was born.
Today, the Zaky glove is used in NICUs and homes across the country to simulate parental touch and assist in preemie development. Because beyond providing preemies with the sensation of a mother's touch, love, and care while they're in isolation, the Zaky also helps NICU babies' bones and muscles to properly develop. "A lot of our tiny babies, we need them to be positioned so that they don't get frog legs and flat heads and things like that," University of Kentucky neonatologist Lori Shook, M.D., said in the Huffington Post video. "We can use [the Zaky] to position them into a nice, neutral position." Dr. Shook also mentions that the gloves, especially those carrying the mother's scent, help the babies to sleep better while in the NICU, which is important to their fragile health.
Watch the full video below to learn more about the gloves — and catch a glimpse of a healthy (and all-grown-up!) Zach.
