The I Love You massage, one letter at a time

Somewhere in every South Asian household there is a woman who can settle a windy baby's stomach with her eyes half closed, and she has never once called it the "I Love You" massage. She just calls it rubbing the belly the right way.

The letters are new. The strokes are not.

Here's the technique itself, three strokes traced in order, plus the two things that actually change whether it works — the order you do them in, and how hard you press.

What is the I Love You massage?

Three strokes traced on your baby's belly, shaped like the letters I, L and U, each one following a stretch of the gut a little further than the last. It's one way of shaping the tummy-circles step of a full colic massage sequence — the version with a name Western parenting classes could put on a worksheet.

A South Asian grandmother doing the same clockwise circles never needed the mnemonic, or the worksheet. She just knew which way the belly went.

"There is an infant massage technique called 'I love you' that is supposed to help move things through the GI tract," one mother wrote on The Bump forums in November 2008, passing it along the way most people first hear about it — secondhand, from someone whose baby it worked for. It's a report, not a guarantee, and worth holding both halves of that at once.

How do you do the "I" stroke?

Baby on their back, oiled hand flat. Stroke straight down the left side of their belly, from just under the ribs to the hip — top to bottom, one smooth pass. That's the whole letter.

It follows the descending colon, the last stretch before things need to go somewhere. Three or four slow passes is plenty before you move to the next letter.

It's the same downward pass we ask you to slow right down for anywhere it shows up on this site.

How do you do the "L" stroke?

Two strokes in one shape. Across the top of the belly first, from your baby's right side to their left, then straight down the left side to the hip — the same line the "I" just traced. Think of it as an upside-down L.

You're now covering the last two-thirds of the gut's path, not just the final stretch. Same pressure, same slow pace. Three or four passes again.

This is roughly the point in the Gas Relief routine where parents tell us they first feel something shift.

How do you do the "U" stroke, and why does it come last?

The full loop. Start low on your baby's right side, stroke up toward the ribs, across the top, then down the left side to the hip — an upside-down U tracing the whole path air actually has to travel: up the ascending colon, across, then down and out.

That order — I, then L, then U — isn't arbitrary. Each letter rehearses a little more of the route before you ask the whole thing to move at once. Skip straight to the U and you're pushing at a gate nothing's opened yet.

Parents tell us this is the one that finally gets things moving, once the first two have done their quieter work.

When should you do it, and how hard should you press?

An hour after a feed, nearer two after a big one — same rule as the rest of the colic sequence, and for the same reason. Firm strokes on a full stomach get you spit-up, not relief.

Pressure is where every family seems to have an opinion, usually a loud one. Hard enough to move the skin under your fingers, not hard enough to change the shape of the belly.

If someone on speakerphone is telling you to go harder, that's the line to hold.

Ten to fifteen strokes total, a few of each letter, takes under two minutes. It's not a session. It's something you do on the way to somewhere else.

Does it actually work for gas and colic?

The honest answer: nobody's proven it does, and plenty of parents will tell you it does anyway. The best available review of infant massage, covering healthy babies under six months, found nothing that held up against a proper comparison for crying or fussing generally.

What gets reported instead is smaller and more specific than "it cured the colic" — wind moving, a baby settling ten minutes sooner than the usual wait. One mother on Reddit's r/beyondthebump described doing it daily since birth and crediting the I Love You strokes specifically for gas in the early weeks, which is the shape most of these accounts take: not a cure, a habit that seems to help on the nights it helps.

Ninety-five percent of Indian caregivers surveyed believe massage simply can't cause harm — which is a reasonable place to land on something with weak evidence and essentially no downside, oil and gentle hands being what they are.

We won't sell it to you as more than that, and you should be wary of anyone who does.

Where did the letters come from?

It's the same decade, roughly, that gave the West Shantala — the 1976 book named after the Indian woman Frédérick Leboyer filmed massaging her baby, whose own identity nobody thought to record. The technique survived the trip. The women teaching it, mostly, didn't get their names on it.

It's part of why we put a name and a date on every claim on this site, rather than just a plausible-sounding one.

What to take from this

Three strokes, in order, under two minutes, an hour clear of a feed. Nothing here needs a class or a certificate — it's a slightly formalised version of what a grandmother's hands already know, taught the way this kind of thing has always travelled, one household to the next.

The Gas Relief routine walks the full seven-step sequence this fits into, guided, if you'd rather follow along than hold the letters in your head at eleven at night.