For more information on babywearing you can visit askdrsears.com. Here is an excerpt from the information that Dr. Sears offers on his web site.
Sling babies cry less. In
1986, a team of pediatricians in Montreal reported on a study of
ninety-nine mother-infant pairs. The first group of parents were
provided with a baby carrier and assigned to carry their babies for at
least three extra hours a day. They were encouraged to carry their
infants throughout the day, regardless of the state of the infant, not
just in response to crying or fussing. In the control, or noncarried
group, parents were not given any specific instructions about carrying.
After six weeks, the infants who received supplemental carrying cried
and fussed 43 percent less than the noncarried group.
Sling babies learn more.
If infants spend less time crying and fussing, what do they do with the
free time? They learn! Sling babies spend more time in the state of
quiet alertness . This is the behavioral state in which an infant is
most content and best able to interact with his environment. It may be
called the optimal state of learning for a baby. Researchers have also
reported that carried babies show enhanced visual and auditory
alertness.
Sling babies are more organized. As baby
places her ear against her mother's chest, mother's heartbeat,
beautifully regular and familiar, reminds baby of the sounds of the
womb. As another biological regulator, baby senses mother's rhythmic
breathing while worn tummy- to-tummy, chest-to-chest. Simply stated,
regular parental rhythms have a balancing effect on the infant's
irregular rhythms. Babywearing "reminds" the baby of and continues the
motion and balance he enjoyed in the womb.
Sling babies get "humanized" earlier.
Another reason that babywearing enhances learning is that baby is
intimately involved in the caregiver's world. Baby sees what mother or
father sees, hears what they hear, and in some ways feels what they
feel. Carried babies become more aware of their parents' faces, walking
rhythms, and scents. Baby becomes aware of, and learns from, all the
subtle facial expressions, body language, voice inflections and tones,
breathing patterns, and emotions of the caregiver.
Sling babies are smarter.
She (your baby) so intimately participates in what mother is doing that
her developing brain stores a myriad of experiences, called patterns of
behavior. These experiences can be thought of as thousands of tiny
short-run movies that are filed in the infant's neurological library to
be rerun when baby is exposed to a similar situation that reminds her
of the making of the original "movie."