Kangaroo Care Gives Preemie a Soft Landing : Neonatology: At Encino-Tarzana Regional Medical Center, a tiny infant spends time each day in her mother’s arms.

It’s dinner time for the premature babies sleeping in their incubators, and tiny Alexes, responding to an inner clock, is beginning to stir from her slumber. She stretches--forearms and hands together no bigger than a man’s thumb--and yawns soundlessly. A smile teases the corners of her mouth.

Care for Alexes--born 14 weeks prematurely--is part of a medical technique once considered too risky for babies so tiny. Each day, she is taken from the cocoon-like safety of her incubator to lie, for up to three hours at a stretch, against her mother’s bosom.

Premature babies, who are prone to temperature-control and respiratory problems, can’t survive for long outside incubators. However, studies show that mothers, through skin-to-skin contact, can take the place of incubators, naturally regulating their babies’ temperature and breathing.

Medical experts say the practice helps the babies grow faster and sleep better, while allowing mothers to bond with their infants as they wait for them to get big enough to take home. Premature infants also respond to skin-to-skin contact from fathers.

Alexes’ mother, Tracy Johnson of Simi Valley, commutes daily to Encino-Tarzana Regional Medical Center, where her daughter was born April 2, weighing 2 pounds.

Johnson squeezes time out from her college studies in health education to visit her tiny daughter. At the hospital, a quiet room with a recliner chair awaits her.

One recent day, Johnson coos softly to Alexes as she removes her “Sweet Pea” from her incubator. Johnson then opens her blouse, kicks back in the chair and cradles her daughter--all 3 pounds of her--to her chest.

“She knows me,” says Johnson, as she massages her daughter’s back with her fingers. With her other hand, she feeds her daughter predigested formula from a plastic dispenser.

“She knows my voice; she responds to my voice; she’ll open her eyes when she hears me,” Johnson says.

Soon, Alexes is asleep once again.

Skin-to-skin mothering was developed a decade ago in Colombia, out of necessity, because so many hospitals there could not afford incubators, experts said. Kangaroo Care, as it is called, is patterned after marsupials, whose offspring are not fully developed when they are born.

Blind and hairless, newly born marsupials crawl from the mother’s womb into her pouch, where they feed on a nipple as they grow.

Kangaroo Care is catching on elsewhere, in Europe as well as in the United States, said Jane Persoon, director of neonatal services at Children’s Health Care-St. Paul in St. Paul, Minn. She said that hospital’s program, launched in 1989, now provides Kangaroo Care to an average of 30 babies a day.

UCLA, which is conducting a study based on the Encino-Tarzana program, found no incidence of brain damage or respiratory problems among the 15 premature infants who have received the treatment at the hospital over the past year and a half, said Carla Ferreira, a respiratory therapist who coordinates the UCLA study.

Similar studies elsewhere, she said, also show the practice to be safe.

Alexes appears to be benefiting from the program, said Dr. James Schick, a neonatologist at the medical center. As of Tuesday she weighed 3 pounds, 7 ounces.

“Alexes has done very well for a baby her size,” he said. “She is very stable at this point.”

But Alexes, he said, won’t be able to go home for about 10 more weeks. Without Kangaroo Care, it would take much longer.

Alexes is the only baby among the 20 or so premature infants now at the hospital who is receiving the treatment, hospital officials said. The program is limited because the sophisticated machinery needed to monitor the infants is expensive.

Johnson and her husband, Mark, who also provides Alexes with Kangaroo Care--say they are not worried about their tiny daughter’s survival. “I know she’s going to be fine,’ ” Tracy Johnson said.

Almost two hours after Tracy Johnson arrived at the hospital for her visit Friday, it is time for her to leave. Alexes is awake and stretching contentedly, her dark blue eyes glowing in a state of bliss.

Johnson puts her Sweet Pea back into the incubator and gives her a pacifier, which the infant sucks happily, her eyelids falling closed, as she descends into a world of dreams known only to babies.