Five Things NOT to Do to Babies
When I had a puppy, he hated to be ignored or left alone. At those times he would chew up the furniture. Babies hate these things too, but they can’t damage the furniture to let us know. Instead, their development gets undermined and we and society have to live with the anxious and depressed results.
What should we NOT do to babies?
1. Ignore them (don’t)
Under natural birth conditions, newborns are ready to communicate with mother, father and others.Colwyn Trevarthen has videos showing newborn communication with a parent. Of course, they cannot talk but they can grunt and move their arms (the left arm is typically self-referential and the right arm focused on the partner). Some mothers communicate with the baby in the womb through singing, reading, talking, or even thumping. In indigenous cultures, the mother is responsible for shaping the spirit of the child with communications like these to the baby before and after birth, even creating a unique song for that child (e.g., Turnbull, 1983).