Babies cry for many reasons, and it is important to learn your baby’s personality and his or her different cries so that you can respond to them. There are cries that mean, “I need affection,” “I’m hungry,” “I’m in pain,” “I’m uncomfortable,” “I’m tired and cranky and don’t know how to get to sleep,” and still others that are simply “venting” all the stress the baby takes in, adjusting to the world of non-stop stimulation. Each cry can and should be responded to appropriately. Each baby will differ in his or her need for physical affection. Some need to be held nearly all the time for the fir ..read more

Nurturant Men, Successful Kids: You Can Help. Children benefit immensely from affectionate interaction with both parents. Dr. Michael Lamb, author of The Role of the Father in Child Development says, “A warm, affectionate father-son relationship can strengthen a boy’s masculine development. A nurturant father is a more available model than a non-nurturant father. the nurturant father’s behavior is more often associated with affection and praise and acquires more reward value. Thus a boy with a nurturant father has more incentive to imitate his father than a boy with a non-nurturant father.” &n ..read more

Source: A HISTORY OF THE THEORY OF PRENATAL ATTACHMENT John Bowlby’s theory of human attachment has become widely applied across disciplines and across the stages of human development. This discussion explores the evolution of an application of Bowlby’s theory to the experience of pregnancy, from both maternal and paternal perspectives. Although the theoretical construct of maternal-fetal attachment (MFA) requires continued theoretically-driven research, existing studies have associated this proposed construct with health behaviors, marital relationship, depressive symptoms, and the postpartum ..read more

We all think our autobiographies are terribly interesting, and most of the time we are right. But children live now. They will be interested in your story later, when they become fascinated by their own, as adults. Observe your tendency to project your own experience onto your children. When you do that, you respond not to them but to a long-gone you. It doesn’t help them. If that long-gone you needs attention, get it in the therapist’s office. Try to see your child without that filter. For example, when you hear your baby cry, do you analyze its meaning through your own autobiography? Perhaps ..read more

Fathers today take an increasingly active interest in the care and nurturing of their infants. However, men often feel dissatisfied with their ability to form this meaningful relationship. Fifty years ago, dads were relegated to the waiting room as the birth of their child took place behind closed doors. Fast-forward to the present, and those doors have been thrown wide open. In many instances, however, fathers are still part of the background, playing supportive but limited roles in the upbringing of their babies. Creating a bond should begin at birth, and research has shown that massage can ..read more

A study conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that mothers may emit odors that teach their infants what to be afraid of, even if the fearful experience is one that the baby has never been exposed to. The research may help explain a phenomenon that has perplexed scientists for generations: Children may have intense trauma reactions to events that they never experienced, but that their parents did. For example, children of Holocaust survivors often exhibited nightmares, flashbacks, and avoidance behaviors ..read more

A woman goes into labor and gives birth. The newborn is swaddled and placed to sleep in a nearby bassinet, or taken to the hospital nursery so that the mother can rest. Despite this common practice, research published in Biological Psychiatry provides new evidence that separating infants from their mothers is stressful to the baby. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends against co-sleeping with an infant, due to its association with Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or SIDS. This notion has been debunked in the last couple of years, by the physician who first made a case for it. Safe co-sle ..read more

Once on a television news spot, I was asked to demonstrate infant massage and talk about its benefits. As we hurried to the newsroom, the host said, “I hear you have a way to stop a baby’s screams in one second flat with massage. I hope you can show us that today!” The baby, a sweet four-month-old with whom I’d had a lovely conversation in the “green room,” took one look at the newscaster and began to cry inconsolably. I did not demonstrate massage because I felt it would betray her feelings to use it as a trick to quiet her (even if it could have, which I doubt). The host concluded that the i ..read more

Skin Stimulation Is Important for Mammals Skin sensitivity is the earliest-developed and most fundamental functions of the body. Nurturing stimulation of the skin is, in fact, essential for adequate organic and psychological development, both for animals and for human beings. When asked what he thought of infant massage, anthropologist Ashley Montagu commented, “People don’t realize that communication for a baby, the first communications it receives and the first language of its development, is through the skin. If only most people had realized this they would have all along given babies the k ..read more

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