The connected baby

Did you know that a newborn baby has the ability to mimic your facial expressions! Your baby is born connected! Research has shown that babies can mimic things like protruding their tongue, opening their mouth and pursing their lips and even pointing their finger. We just need to know about this and watch and see what our babies do!

In this day and age of technology we need to be very careful when and how we use our technology around our babies. So often our focus is on our smart phone, answering chats, looking up info, scrolling through Facebook and so the list goes.

Connection with our babies shapes their brain development. Our connection with our baby could shape a better humanity. According to Dr Gabor Mate – the three environmental conditions absolutely essential to optimal human brain development are – nutrition, physical security and consistent emotional nurturing…. The third one – the emotional nurturance is the one most likely to be disrupted in our western society.

It is of critical importance for parents to know that they can improve their child’s learning abilities significantly by exercising their baby’s brain in the first three years of life. Babies are born with an innate connectedness. Just take the time and watch and look at a newborn baby and see what he does and how he wants to connect with you. However, most of us just get on to social media as soon as possible to let family and friends know our baby has arrived and they forget they need to connect with their baby and take time for you to get to know each other.

At birth, the brain is the most immature of the baby’s organs. By age 1, it has attained approximately 70% of its final mass. By age 3, approximately 90% of its final mass. There are 750 new synaptic connections that occur in a baby’s brain per second in these early days. These connections are like motorways forming in the brain – being built depending on the conditions it is built in. If it is built with connectedness, love and security, the pathways will develop one way verse if it is developed without much connectedness and in a very tense stressful environment the connections in the brain will look totally different. And these are nearly all formed by the age of 3 years. We do not have long to form good pathways for life.

Try at all times to be aware of connectedness with your baby. So many people feel that a new baby is like a blob and is too small to know anything or interact – which is so far from the truth. They just leave them in the car seat or lying down in their cot and leave them to “exist”. Look at them, talk to them, interact with them – right from the moment they are born. Have them facing you when you push them in your stroller when they are little so they can interact with you and know that they are safe and you close by.

 

A fascinating You-Tube video clip worth watching is called Dance of the nappy and can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnL3qDYp1iE

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