How to Cope with Infant Trauma

Often I hear people say that that “it is a good thing that the baby was so young” when he or she was exposed to traumatic events in the womb, infancy and early childhood as the child can’t remember or feel these incidents. This harmful view implies that the child is OK nonetheless.  Until the 1980s, the medical and psychological professions believed that babies had “infantile amnesia” prior to age three.  It was thought that babies could not feel pain from medical surgeries and were not capable of remembering, as they were in a preverbal state without a fully developed brain.  New evidence in prenatal and perinatal psychology, including research and writings by David Chamberlain, William Emerson, and the neurobiologists Alan Schore and David Siegel, have shown that prenates and young babies do have emotions, feel pain, and are capable of memory and intelligence.  Parents need to understand this topic in order to prevent, recognize, and heal early trauma.

This is an excerpt of a longer article, which you can read by clicking here.

Reduce Your Risk of Premature Birth

Premature births are rising at an alarming rate in the U.S, 36% in the past 25 years.  Being born prematurely reduces the time that the baby has to grow and develop. It is the major cause of infant death and is associated with developmental delays, mental retardation, and mental health issues.  Studies show that even a few extra days in the womb can make a huge difference in positive outcomes for the baby.

 What do women and their partners need to know? First of all, you can avoid many of the causes of prematurity, including smoking, exposure to environmental toxins, and drug and alcohol use.  Ask your doctor about microbiogical screening in early pregnancy to treat hidden infections, including of the vagina, kidneys and bladder.  If you have chronic illness such as hypertension, diabetes, or lupus, you need to monitor them carefully.  Your risk of premature birth also increases if you are African-American, under 18, or over 40.

Today, many couples use in vitro fertilization (IVF) to conceive.  A common practice has been to implant several embryos, which often results in multiple births.  Unfortunately,   these children are at a much higher risk of premature birth.  A recent study from the March of Dimes highlights the risks of multiple pregnancies and prematurity associated with IVF.  Please read it if you’re considering fertility treatments.

Do You Know What Your Child is Feeling?

Many parents today sacrifice to give advantages to their young children and teens, such as  going to the best preschool, college, extracurricular lessons or trip abroad. However, these same parents often don’t take the time to know what their children are experiencing and feeling day-to-day.  Unfortunately, time spent on day-to-day communication does not seem to be on the top of parenting priorities.  

When a child has an experience, but can’t talk about it, that experience can be meaningless for them.  The psychologist Rollo May so wisely stated: “Anxiety comes from not being able to know the world you’re in, not being able to orient yourself in your own existence”. As a teacher and therapist, I see both children and adults who lack opportunities to be heard and related to in authentic ways.  They often are suffering silently.  Reflecting back another person’s feelings is actually an easy skill to learn. All it takes is to observe, ask questions and empathize.  Is your loved one feeling sad, mad, glad or scared?  Reflect that back to them with genuine concern. Put yourself in that person’s shoes without judgment. “I see that you are feeling very mad, can you tell me more about that?” “I am sorry that you feel disappointed that your friend was mean to you at school.” These simple expressions of empathy go a long way to establish bonds of trust, safety and love.

 We all need to feel that others, especially loved ones and family members, care about us and know what is going on in our lives.  When our children experience our love directly and get that validation, they grow emotionally and develop interpersonal skills. Children and teens can’t get this on Facebook. They need old-fashioned face-to –face or heart-to heart relating. Spending time regularly with your child, before bed or at the dinner table, is essential to understanding your child, who needs you to be there for him.

Learning from Smart Babies

Infant research, which began in the 1970’s, has been revealing for three decades that babies are much smarter than we think, beginning in womb. Moms and dads tell me all the time about the amazing capabilities of their infants — but then, they usually say that whatever their child did  must have been a random event. They don’t give their child much credit.  As parents, we need to be fully aware of who our babies are and what can teach us! Babies are themselves master teachers who are conscious and present to each moment, can compassionately pick up on our feelings and needs, and imitate others’ sounds and actions.  Babies are always learning, sensing and feeling at a very rapid rate because their open minds function without a filter. Alison Gopnik, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has written a new book, The Philosophical Baby, in which she identifies how the baby’s pure mind and heart is awakening our own spiritual qualities. She summarized her ideas in a recent article in The New York Times.

Remember, that, as a new parent, you are learning exponentially from your baby about the value of expressing love, having a sense of wonder, joy and spontaneity in daily life. When we consciously interact with our children through their play, there can be a true meeting-of-minds. Neuroscience tells us that this sharing of minds, which occurs through mutual eye contact, is the primary dynamic through which the infant brain develops. Your close eye contact with your baby builds their basic trust with another in an enriched environment. The quality of this kind of interaction also allows us as adults to feel met by another and to enjoy peak emotional moments. We can share the wonder of children’s growing abilities and appreciate the heart opening within us.

As you provide daily care to your babies, remember that they are smart and that they are teaching you every moment.

Getting Your Baby to Sleep

It is natural for new parents to think a lot about their baby’s sleep needs, patterns and routines. All babies need to be placed on their backs for sleep to reduce the risk of SIDS. Of course, every baby is different and some babies settle better than others based upon many factors. Generally, newborns do not sleep for any long period of time because their tummies are so small and they get hungry. They wake up to feed and to be soothed. With these youngest of babies, up to six months (before eating solid food), it is critical that you respond to their cries quickly.  Receiving this kind of nurture helps the baby establish both basic trust that you will meet their basic needs.  This is critical to developing a secure parent-infant bond.

Parents often get exhausted and want to take action to get the baby to sleep.  There is a lot of advice on this subject! One well-known approach, developed by pediatric sleep expert, Richard Ferber, uses a controlled crying method. Although this approach, which advocates letting the baby cry at intervals, usually works, it is controversial. There is sufficient brain research to suggest that baby’s brain is not sufficiently developed to understand why he is being left alone with no comfort, which can be emotionally traumatizing to him. I join the ranks of other sleep experts, William Sears, Pinkie Mc Kay and Elizabeth Pantley, who follow a gentler approach to getting the baby and toddler to sleep.

Here are some helpful sleep tips: 

• Swaddle your newborn and try using a sleep sack with older babies.
• Establish a consistent bedtime routine by the time your baby is six to nine months old (may vary according to your baby’s development).
• Provide a relaxing, winding down period at least 45 minutes before bedtime.
• Create a bedtime ritual with bath and story.
• Give opportunities for the older infant and toddler to learn to self soothe while still awake.
• Relax with your child by talking softly, singing lullabies and using gentle touch.

For good advice on sleep issues, read The No-Cry Sleep Solution, by Elizabeth Pantley and William Sears.

Sweet dreams to you and your baby!

Crawling in the News

Did you crawl as a baby?  

In a June Scientific American article, David Tracer, an anthropologist from University of Colorado, is reported to be questioning whether crawling is necessary for normal human development. Many indigenous cultures carried their babies on their backs, perhaps for hygienic reasons. They benefitted from being close to their mother’s bodies and from having that rhythmical sway. Children from Paraguay, Indonesia and Mali are not culturally encouraged to crawl, but seem to turn out OK. 

I have baby pictures of myself spending a lot of infant time in a playpen.  According to my parents, I did not crawl.  As a child, I was not athletic and had hand-eye coordination problems.  In college, I studied the theories of Glenn Doman and Carl Delacato, who advocate the importance of motor crawling in infants and for adults who have missed this developmental step, which promotes right brain development and eye convergence. Later, I was taught how to crawl as an adult, in a movement class with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, a somatic educator who founded the school of Body-mind Centering.  I personally benefitted from motor re-patterning. Learning to alternate my left-right, arm-leg movements helped my gait become smoother and improved my balance.

As a movement educator, I have seen that crawling is developmentally important for infants and for children with learning disabilities. I have encouraged hundreds of infants to crawl with hours spent doing tummy time.  See my earlier post on this blog, entitled Born to Move.

The bottom line here may be that babies need to be physically close to their mother or father, to be carried or worn on the back, and to have the opportunities for movement exploration that crawling affords.

Conscious Babies in Womb

Yes, as amazing as it sounds, babies are conscious in the womb! They are sentient beings who are recording their first experiences in utero and deeply affected by their earliest imprinting which may be positive or negative. Early traumas received can greatly impact a child and adult’s core belief’s that influence later patterns of learning, psychological well-being and health.  Babies need to know that they are wanted and loved from conception on and deeply appreciate having conscious parents who plan for them, bond with them and protect them staring in utero.

Welcoming Consciousness, by Wendy Ann McCarty, Ph.D., is a new book that presents an innovative model of infant development that includes consciousness of the prenate. I consider this book a must read for all expecting parents, parents and infant professionals! I love her beginning words, “When we recognize, acknowledge, and support the sentient being entering human form, we re-constellate our theories, assessments, intervention, parenting practices, and foundational ways of being to support wholeness from the beginning of life.”

 Dr. McCarty, formally a labor nurse, has spent the last 25 years doing pioneering clinical work with infants and their families. She developed an expanded view of fetal and infant memory and capabilities that I honor as a prenatal and perinatal psychologist.  We therapeutically assist babies to clear birthing and other traumas. They reveal amazing stories about their gestation, labor, birth and early infancy through gestures and body language!

Here are some basic ways to help an infant release and repattern prenatal pain:

• Slow down the pace
• Bring love and compassion to the baby about what he /she has experienced
• Follow the baby’s bodily cues
• Reflect back to him what is he is doing and feeling
• Differentiate the past from the present

As a parent, you can support your baby by acknowledging his consciousness, experiences, feelings and needs.  The first step is to listen and watch.

Becky on TV

On Wednesday, July 29, I appeared on the Great Day St. Louis television program (KMOV, Channel 4, in St. Louis) to talk about the effects of maternal stress on babies in the womb.  Watch the interview here.

Try Conscious Parenting

We are entering a new era in which we realize the tremendous impact that parenting choices and early experiences have on even the youngest infants, who deserve loving and responsible parents.

Conscious parenting represents a paradigm shift as mothers and fathers wake up to the idea that they can think deeply about how they want to raise their children, and take full responsibility for their parenting styles, and behaviors. The primary goal of conscious parenting is to change yourself in order to parent your children with awareness and love. As parents, we often operate out of fear or from limiting beliefs that we haven’t examined.  We may unconsciously repeat detrimental patterns that we learned from our own parents.  How were YOU birthed, nurtured, talked to and disciplined?   Conscious parents are willing to examine their own parenting histories, be their authentic selves, recognize that they make mistakes, and make repairs — always with the goal of building trust in the parent-child relationship.  Parents who take this approach see positive outcomes in their children’s behavior, their own personal development, and family harmony.   Here are the steps to becoming a conscious parent:

1.  Gain insight into your attitudes, behaviors, and past programming about parenting in order identify your personal story which may be influencing your mindset.  
2. Set your specific intentions as a parent.  What are your goals?  What do you envision as your primary roles: disciplinarian, teacher, protector, problem solver, and motivator?  
3. Practice mindfulness. This means being present to your child who is your reflective mirror.  Five minutes spent with complete attention is better than an hour of being “half there.”  Something as simple as paying attention to your breath and slowing down your breathing can help you center in your body to calm stressful situations. 
4. Discover and accept your child’s unique personality and gifts.  From the earliest age our children are independent beings.  We can’t make them be who we want them to be. We need to allow them to unfold at their own pace. 

Click here to read my longer article on this subject in the Late Summer 2009 issue of St. Louis Kids magazine.

Happy World Breastfeeding Week!

The American Academy of Pediatricians recommends exclusive breastfeeding for the first 6 months of life. Breastfeeding is great nurture for both moms and babies. The major benefits include creating a special bond with your baby, building your baby’s immune system, starting with the colostrum (the first fluid from your breasts), and reducing your risks of some cancers and osteoporosis. It is one of the best things that I ever did as a mother. It felt so good to have special times during the day to relax and spend quality time with my two babies. I found it cheaper and easier than using formula.  Breastfeeding is Nature’s way, but it is an art that takes time to perfect.

Here are some breastfeeding success tips:

• Tell your doctor and labor nurse that you are planning to breastfeed.
• Try to breastfeed your baby within the first hour of life. If you have a C-section, ask to feed your baby in the recovery room.
• Have your baby crawl up to your breast after birth, if there is opportunity for this (usually takes about 45 minutes).
• Do not use pacifiers in the hospital or allow the nurses to give your baby sugar water or formula!
• Room in with your baby to get to know his hunger cues (most babies suck their fist or make sucking movements with their mouth).
• Realize that it takes several days for your milk to come in.
• Have your baby open his mouth wide to get a good latch on. You can rub his mouth with your nipple.
• Breastfeed at least 8-12 times a day to keep and build you milk supply.
• Allow some time during the day for just skin-to-skin contact.
• Experiment finding positions that feel comfortable and work best to accomplish a good latching on.
• Keep your baby close by your bed in a bassinet for easier night feedings.
• Drink lots of water and watch your diet.
• Buy a good breast feeding pump if you are working. 

Don’t give up if you are having difficulties. Get help from nurses in the hospital, doulas, and lactation consultants.  Two great websites are breastfeeding.com and La Leche League.