When I was a young pregnant mother-to-be, I’d never even heard of “kangaroo care.” Sure, I’d planned on cuddling my baby once she was born, and looked forward to breastfeeding and bonding with her. But when she was born early—at just over 25 week’s gestation—everything changed.

During the first two weeks, I could not touch her aside from stroking her tiny, see-through arm softly through the incubator. This ultimately broke my heart more than so much else did at the time—not being able to touch her, to be connected with her, as we’d been for months (for a lifetime, if you count her status as an egg in my body!).

When I was finally able to hold her, they introduced me to this concept of “kangaroo care,” which is basically just skin-on-skin contact with your infant. This is supposed to help babies—especially preemies, though all babies can benefit from the holding—with so many different things.  It helps reduce colic, sleep apnea, and overall stay in the hospital. It helps increase the baby’s weight gain and body temperature, and helps mother and child maintain a close lactation bond. It also helps keep the baby’s oxygenation level, heart rate, and respiration rate stable.

This may sound bizarre to people unfamiliar with kangaroo care—after all, how could a mother’s touch be that healing? It turns out that it certainly can.

Throughout our three-month stay in the NICU, we witnessed lots of mothers giving kangaroo care to their children—fathers, too. Every time a baby would be near his or her mother—listening to that heartbeat, feeling that real warmth, identifying that familiar smell—everything would immediately improve. We could visually see this on all of the monitors attached to our children.

Each time I held my daughter—tucked into my bra, she was so tiny—her stats would all improve to near perfection. As the nurses told me, it takes about three days in the NICU to simulate a day in the womb, and I believe it. When my little wood sprite’s oxygenation levels were in the low 80’s, I could hold her—and sometimes even just sing to her softly—and they would vastly improve, often up to 100%. She knew who I was; this did not occur with the nurses.

And an even more amazing story involves a mother who actually brought her child back from the dead—hours after doctors pronounced him dead—by cradling him on her bare chest, talking to him softly, and telling him how much he was loved. Slowly, the baby took a breath here and there until finally he opened his eyes and was amazingly, fully breathing on his own. The baby is now healthy and fine, several months old, along with his twin sister.

Perhaps there’s power in that old saying about a mother’s touch after all.