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Are you an affectionate parent? Or are you the kind of parent that hardly hugs your kids?

If your answer to the first question is yes – then best you don’t stop doing what you’re doing.

According to recent research, physical affection during a baby’s development period is even more significant than we thought.

Apparently, the more you hug a baby, the more their brains grow, according to a recent survey from the Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Ohio.

In the study, 125 babies, both premature and full-term, were included, which looked at how well they responded to being physically touched.

The results of the study indicated that premature babies responded to affection, less than babies who were not born premature.

What the study has also revealed, was that babies that were subjected to more affection by parents or hospital staff showed stronger brain response.

Researcher Dr. Nathalie Maitre says that this last revelation tells us that something as simple as body contact or rocking your baby in your arms will make a big difference in how their brains develop.

“Making sure that preterm babies receive positive, supportive touch such as skin-to-skin care by parents is essential to help their brains respond to gentle touch in ways similar to those of babies who experienced an entire pregnancy inside their mother’s womb,” Maitre tells Science Daily.

Affection is important for the development of the brain. So, remember to cuddle and hug your babies as much as you can.

YouTube Cans The Weird And Creepy Kid Channel ‘Toy Freaks’

YouTube has put an end to the massive channel Toy Freaks in what appears to be a purge of questionable content which has been targeted at kids.

With more than 8.5 million subscribers, Toy Freaks was one of the largest channels to produce content for children, though many parents were concerned with the weird, often creepy, and potentially abusive videos.

The channel featured a father, who was referred to as “Freak Daddy” and his two daughters, Victoria and Annabelle. Even though the channel has been terminated, a quick search on YouTube will still show a number of their videos existing on other channels, like the one below.

A spokesperson for YouTube put forward the following statement:

“We take child safety extremely seriously and have clear policies against child endangerment. We recently tightened the enforcement of these policies to tackle content featuring minors where we receive signals that cause concern. It’s not always clear that the uploader of the content intends to break our rules, but we may still remove their videos to help protect viewers, uploaders and children. We’ve terminated the Toy Freaks channel for violation of our policies. We will be conducting a broader review of associated content in conjunction with expert Trusted Flaggers.”

Many of their videos featured the girls in possibly abusive situations, prompting concerned parents and popular YouTubers to complain, and call for a shutdown of the channel.

While criticism of Toy Freaks has existed for years, recent media coverage of this channel and others like it has brought more attention to the videos.

“This … father puts his young daughters under extreme pressure, pain, stress and anxiety and films them. He is profiting off of his children’s pain and suffering. If this isn’t abuse, I don’t know what is,” one Redditor wrote on the YouTube subbredit.

In the same post, the Redditor describes a specific video, which bothered them.

“One of their latest videos sees the father follow his little girl into the bathroom and film her as she’s crying in severe pain, blood flowing from her mouth and her tooth falling out,” they wrote.

The channel also made famous the “bad baby” trope, which often featured one of the children on the channel misbehaving.

“Toddler is never so uncontrollable as she is after watching one of those stupid fucking bad baby videos,” an annoyed parent wrote about the trope.

While Toy Freaks was very popular, it was also a money-making machine that benefitted heavily from YouTube’s algorithm.

According to the third-party analytics site Social Blade, the channel raked in an estimated $838,300 to $13.4 million per year. While that estimate is vast, even the low end of that scale shows that some serious money was being made.

Not too long ago, we reported that creepy, weird, and often violent videos were slipping through YouTube’s filters, often landing on its YouTube Kids app.

YouTube then announced a new policy change last week, which age restricts flagged content on its main app, which will automatically block it from getting filtered into the Kids App.

The Toy Freaks channel appears to be just another step in a larger push from YouTube to reign in its content put out there for children.