Newborn Play
Do you have a newborn baby at home? Sometimes it can be hard to know what to do with a newborn baby when they're actually awake. First off, that can be rare. (Find this video on Placer Birth Connection’s Instagram page).
Some of the first things we're focusing on with babies, of course is learning to eat and sleep.
Trust
The number one goal in the first two to three months is to build trust by being responsive, by meeting our baby's needs, and by getting to know them. And even building trust with ourselves that it's okay to be wherever we are. Our goal is to love our baby, take care of our baby, but it's okay to be a first time parent. If you're a first time parent, it's okay to be a first time parent. It’s okay if it doesn’t feel totally natural yet. Let's embrace being first time parents, but also it's awesome to ask for help and get support. This is a vulnerable time of life, and we all need support at this time. We all need help, and there are tons of strategies that we can use that can make life better.
Tummy Time
After trust, our next goal is tummy time. Why do we need tummy time? The back to sleep campaign for safe sleep tells us that babies are the safest when they sleep Alone on their Backs, in a Crib (ABC). So they’re on their backs when they’re sleeping. They’re on their backs in a car seat. They’re on their backs a lot. So their muscles can get uneven because they’re constantly pulling against gravity from their back, and they need practice and repetition to pull up using the opposite muscles in their backs. So in tummy time we are giving them time on their stomachs when they are awake so that they are strengthening their back and neck muscles. They can have tummy time on our chest or when we hold them facing out. We want babies to get practice lifting their heads and pushing up against gravity on their tummies. That’s going to help them prepare for crawling.
Rolling
Another great thing I learned recently that can help to prepare babies for crawling is that when we are doing diaper changes, we can roll the baby to one side; put the diaper under them; and roll them back. That is good positioning for changing the diaper, and it also is giving them regular practice at rolling.
Time for Play
When is a good time for play? If our number one goal is to be responsive, and to build trust, and to teach the baby that she he or she is lovable, and safe, that the world is a safe place, and that they are lovable, then we want to choose times for play that are appropriate, right? So we want to choose times when the baby has already eaten is not hungry, and is not tired. And with little babies, that can be a real challenge. Because the wake window for a newborn baby, generally speaking, is that they're probably going to be tired about 45 minutes to an hour after they last woke up. And that includes time for feeding. So in the early days, there's not going to be a whole lot of time when they're in that quiet alert state.
The quiet alert state
The quiet alert state is the time when all of us are most available for learning. Even for a toddler, we want to teach before the tantrum and after the tantrum, but teaching in the middle of the tantrum is generally not going to be effective, because our brains are not really in gear when we’re in the middle of a tantrum. Quiet alert is the time when we are not tired; we are not hungry; we are not fussing; we are not crying; we have good eye contact.
Newborn vision
Newborn vision is at its best when the baby is about arm distance away from us, being held in our arms. So it’s best to play with our faces about that distance from them.
Time Differences
We want to remember that a baby’s timeline is WAY slower than ours. If you think about what time was like when you were a young child… I remember that summers as a child felt like they lasted forever. And as we get older, time generally goes faster. Summers seem to go by in the blink of an eye. If we think about that when we are playing, that reminds us that we really have to slow down when we are playing with our baby. Everything is new for them. They are going to need a lot more repetition than we think they will. We’re going to need to have a lot of patience. One of our goals as new parents is to “ruthlessly eliminate hurry” (Dallas Willard).
3 early games: imitation, cause & effect, sound play
A) Imitation
Imitation could be that we just stick our tongues out over and over and give lots of repetition and watch for the little attempts that the baby is probably going to do as they are watching us. We can do simple face movements like raising our eyebrows or opening and closing our mouths. Then when the baby starts to imitate us, we can make a big deal about it. Even if the baby doesn’t know our words, they know when we are excited and that they did something that we got excited about! We can imitate facial movements. We can imitate the way that they move their fingers, their legs, their shoulders. We can do something that is easy to imitate, or we can imitate something that they are doing.
B) Cause & effect - trial & error
The idea of cause & effect is that we are an experimenter, testing out different ideas. “If I do this, the baby does that.” Similar is trial and error, where we try different causes and see what happens. Parenting is a process of trial and error, and babies use trial and error to figure out the world. When we imitate the baby, we are teaching them about cause & effect, trial and error, body awareness. They are learning so so may things. When I work with families, I bring in a whole toolbox of ideas and a tips and tricks that we can try, and then we experiment to see which tools work best for each baby and each family.
Another example of cause and effect is, under careful adult supervision, tie a ribbon around their arm or leg that attaches to a toy or a kitchen utensil that is attached to a mobile or a car seat handle or a play gym over their head. Or we can find mittens that have rattles in them. The idea is that the baby learns “when I move my arm or leg, I hear a sound” or “when I move my arm or leg, I see that thing move.”
C) Sound play
The last strategy I’m going to talk about is sound play. We can read rhyming books. California First Five has their whole promotional series about Talk, Read, Sing. And we can pick a sound of the day. I would probably start with vowels. You can sing any song without the words… just using that one vowel.
Make it fun
One of my favorite quotes is that “The critical link between play and learning—the reason we repeat something and therefore learn from it—is pleasure” (Stamm & Spencer’s Bright from the Start). The idea is that when we are having fun, we want to do it again. When we do something over and over, the pathway in our brain gets stronger and we learn by repetition. But it’s the pleasure and the fun that makes us WANT the repetition.
Closing thoughts
With newborns, we are focusing on trust. We are focusing on teaching them that they are lovable and worth responding to. We want them to develop muscles evenly on both sides of the body by giving them intentional time on their tummies when they are awake and supervised. We can use imitation, cause & effect, and sound play to teach babies important skills in a FUN way.
