There are so many ways you can get your baby responding to you. Babies respond best when they are face to face with you. This happens every time you change their nappy (diaper) — so many opportunities every day for communication in the early weeks of life!
Did you ever see a person with earplugs or a cell phone and suddenly realise that they aren’t actually ‘looking’ at you or ‘listening’ to you? They don’t even ‘see’ you in those moments! It is critical to remember such things when you might be similarly preoccupied when you are with your baby.
Have you ever cradled your baby and looked down into his eyes? (I hope so!) Remember to take off your hat, glasses or sunglasses! — all children retain a mental picture of you and everytime you change your hair colour, wear sunglasses or a hat you have changed in your child’s mind. Assuming he is calm, dry and fed, as you ‘sweet talk’ him he starts to burble and smile – that’s the beginning of communication! It’s remarkable and exciting to see, and at the same time disturbing to know how many parents don’t understand this concept and how early it all starts.
This communication is something you have to foster day in and day out – it can’t be neglected. Your child needs to be/wants to be/should be face to face with one loving adult for most of their waking hours.
Your biggest challenge, if you are a working mother, is to find safe, dependable, convenient and hopefully loving, care for your child. It’s the risk you have to weigh when you have a baby and it is often a risk that’s only thought about a couple of weeks before you return to work – maybe only weeks after your baby is born! The risk increases at that time because you are under a deadline and from experience I know that once you have had your baby your judgment is impaired in the earliest months.
If you leave your baby in the care of another person or in a group centre you must have a way of knowing whether or not someone, preferably the same person each day, is responding to your child each day in a loving and caring manner, even if it’s simply your sixth sense. Having a camera in the care setting doesn’t guarantee your baby is well cared for.
A lot of daycare centres are ‘just OK’, no matter the cost. Most parents truly know that the facility their baby is in is ‘just OK’. Those parents will often praise the centre’s qualities most convenient to the parents, not the qualities that are the most important factors when it comes to their baby’s development!
Your baby will survive, just as many children from impoverished care survive, but they will frequently not rise to their optimum level at each stage of development. It doesn’t make those centres bad, they just aren’t able to give your child the type of care he truly needs, and is entitled to, in order to have neurotypical development.
Such lack of the necessary ‘mothering’ style care can even happen if you choose to be an ‘at home’ mother. You are probably an otherwise highly qualified individual, much respected in your field, but when it comes to your own baby you just haven’t got that ‘it’ quality that makes your baby respond and be developmentally the best he can be. Your baby will always know that your work is your priority in life.
In such cases, as a working mother, you eventually have to come to terms with your own limitations — your baby will spend 50 hours a week, up to 10 hours a day in a centre — which may quite possibly lead to your child needing some type of developmental or behavioral therapy in years to come.
It has always been known, and is frequently written about, that the optimum care for a baby is a loving mother who is happy to spend time teaching and playing with her infant.
Second best is for the baby to be in a family environment in someone else’s home, living and doing everything daily that a real family does – they end up feeling that they actually belong somewhere and are special.
Third best is for the baby to be in their own home with a caregiver. That caregiver may often be limited in the provisions they can make. Limited either to the inside of the house or to walking the child to one neighborhood park and not being free to take the child to museums, the library or even a different park for a change. Not forgetting that, if price is critical in your choice of caregiver, they may be lacking adequate knowledge of your baby’s primary language and cultural mores, or even a genuine interest in caring for your child.
The last resorts should be ‘facilities’, even with groups of children in someone’s home, where they are frequently cared for in a more mechanical manner. Attachments often aren’t, can’t be, developed in such situations. Who can your baby trust?
Babies may be left lying in a cot (crib) for long periods of the day (especially the ‘good’ and ‘easy’ babies!) ending up with flat head syndrome — plagiocephaly — or jelly legs, where there is no muscle tone in the lower limbs, which most often happens when babies have been left in jiggling baby seats all day or on very soft surfaces where they can’t roll or squirm.
Some may simply be left lying on their backs flapping their hands, their tongue hanging out of the corner of their mouth, mesmerized by the fan spinning above them — especially if they don’t cry!
Ignorant parenting, untrained carers and inadequate staff to child ratios allow such care to continue for months at a time — until, if you’re lucky, a pediatrician, friend or relative observes the condition and brings it to your attention. Even then experts rarely attribute the condition to the care situation and you may place your second baby in the same facility!
Tender holding and handling plus forming an attachment to the caregiver is critical for normal and healthy growth in any young child. Freedom to be on a firm floor is particularly important for the growth of children’s organs like their lungs (I now believe spending hours a day in jiggling baby seats contributes to RSV, a breathing disorder prevalent in infants), their limbs and their core muscle strength. Active infants with freedom of movement (no containers — no swings, no activity centres, no boppy seats, not being propped up) tend to be the healthiest, physically and mentally.
Some parents may resent the attachments that their children form for their caregivers, but this is a healthy and naturally needed attachment, it’s what makes us human (even monkeys need to be attached to thrive!!) and it simply comes about because the caregiver spends much more awake time with the child than the parent.
Loving caregivers can also become very influential in a child’s life. A good caregiver should supplement and complement a parent’s care, assuming that for both of them the child’s healthy development is the primary focus, and the caregiver provides the child with the stability that parents might otherwise give.
If your baby seems more attached to caregivers than his mother (you!) you should really begin to examine your own caregiving skills.
Appropriate early care, parental or otherwise, is critical to the full and well-rounded development of any child. Without it obvious problems and delays will seem to surface between the ages of 2 and 3 years.
An instinctive and experienced observer of babies and young children can often pick out potential problems before a child is 1 year old. Willing and receptive parents then have a chance to either change their own caregiving styles or change caregivers.
Some changes will be simple – stop taking your baby out in the jogging stroller as soon as you get home from work — sit on the floor and really spend quality time reconnecting with him each day.
Alternatively: find a stroller that faces YOU instead of the traffic and take a brisk walk together with you talking and singing while (of course?) looking at and engaging your baby. Maybe you won’t get the ‘high’ that you get when jogging, but your baby will get a ‘high’ by actually seeing and interacting with you!
For the child’s sake the sooner you make changes the better.
By the way, if you think that ‘loving books’ and ‘being read to’ are substitutes for face to face time, you are a victim of propaganda. Your child will not be a competent reader and writer if you haven’t provided them opportunities for learning their spoken language first and filling their lives with interesting words to use on a daily basis.
For information on how you can improve your child’s early language acquisition go to one of the British National Literacy sites: http://talktoyourbaby.co.uk
Or for a point of view on any child care issue please email me.