Every parent wants a healthy, happy, and motivated baby — a baby eager to move, interact, and explore her world. Your Self-Motivated Baby provides you with a fresh approach to parenting based on baby movement research and natural movement development. This book is written to provide you with a new way to parent your baby through movement, enjoy your baby more, and enhance your baby’s social and cognitive development. Educators and professionals will also find this information invaluable in their work and practice. In documenting my ongoing parent-baby movement sessions, I was finding, as other infant researchers were, that babies were revealing their competence in their social interactions and goal-directed actions much earlier than previous research had shown. I felt it was essential to document my ongoing parent-baby movement sessions so that parents and caregivers would have this vital information to make a difference for their baby.

In my two-year preparation for this book, I have analyzed and edited thousands of photos, creating compelling vignettes that will inspire, inform, and delight you. New information about infant development is presented in fascinating detail that will enhance your interactions and understanding of what babies can do, how they communicate, and what they know. You will find that each month includes social and play interactions, guided observations, and movement explorations for you to enjoy with your baby.

In interviews with parents, a mother of one of the babies in this book tells us about her experience in following my Parenting through Movement program at home with her baby. The following is an excerpt from her six-month review:

Kaya is now into her sixth month and it’s amazing to look back at this little baby that I cradled in my arms. My experience of body movement as it relates to my growing and developing child has been truly enriching. I have found a way to connect and communicate with Kaya by entering her space and exploring it together with her. I have found the internal breathing and grounding of my body on the floor a way to find a quiet and calming place for the two of us. And I have found I’m able to discover my own body, all over again.

 

My passion and profound commitment in writing Your Self-Motivated Baby is to inspire you to share in the joy of movement with your baby. I hope it will bring you many hours of pleasure together and will inform and enrich your relationship with your self-motivated baby.

As your baby explores and learns about the world, all his senses come into play, providing him with multimodal learning and experiences that include visual, auditory, touch, and kinesthetic stimulation. A baby’s early experiences are shaped by these multimodal stimuli and by his developing attention system. He refines his ability to shift focus to pick up information relevant for social interactions and to relate to objects in the environment.

The skin is the baby’s largest sensory organ for touch, and newborns already have a well- developed sense of touch. Babies and parents benefit from bonding through touch and by skin-to-skin contact. Touching and being touched by someone else focuses our attention on our body’s sensations. The sense of touch resulting from active exploration guides our attention to an object’s size, shape, weight, texture, and temperature to learn about the external environment.

The baby’s self-touch sensations and specific movements — such as hand-to mouth, hand-to-hand, hands-to-knees and hands-to-feet movements — provide important body awareness organization. When a baby moves, she experiences ongoing kinesthetic feedback from her muscles, joints, and vestibular system. When the baby watches her arms, legs, and hands move, she receives consistent information across visual, touch, and proprioceptive systems.