Newborn Play

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.  

Fear of childbirth

Fear of childbirth

An interview with Karen Rothstein of Sacramento Hypnobirthing

This video is available on Instagram here.

Fear

Sometimes moms will think they have fear, and what they really have is just a little bit of worry and a little bit of anxiety. This (technology changes going Live on Instagram) was fear for me. My heart started racing; I started getting a little sweaty. I was getting ready to go into that fight or flight. And when you said, "Do you want to go later?" I was almost gonna go, "Yeah, that sounds like a really good idea." Oh, boy, that is just a perfect, perfect example of what real fear is for me--just having that visceral reaction.

A lot of women come to hypnobirthing because they are referred by their doula or their physician because they have fear. I don't get a lot of what they call primary fear people--people with tokophobia--that's really a fear of childbirth--because usually those people don't get pregnant. 

Distinguishing between worry, anxiety, and real fear

But what I do get is a lot of secondary fear people, and those are people that they may have had a birth trauma, or maybe they lost a pregnancy, and they have high anxiety, and they have real worries that this time it's going to be just a replay of what happened last time, so they get referred to us. We don't diagnose because we're not therapists or educators, but we need to do an assessment and see if they have worry, if they have anxiety, or if possibly they have real fear. When it comes down to real fear, I would say about 70-75% of women have real worry and anxiety. 

Worry

It's important to make a distinction, because a worry is something you can do something about. So here's an example of a worry. Your sister-in-law gives you her used car seat, and she paid a lot of money for it, but you're just not quite sure it is safe for your baby. You end up doing a lot of worrying about it, and you have double worry right? 

If you get a new car seat. You might risk offending.

If you don't get a new car seat, then every time you put your baby in that car seat, you're gonna have a little bit of angst.

A worry is something that you can do something about. You can bite the bullet. Tell her "thank you very much", and get the car seat that makes you feel comfortable. In the long run, that is going to be far healthier than worrying every time you have to put that baby in the car seat. 

Anxieties

The next thing we get are anxieties. Anxieties usually come up somewhere in pregnancy and it's most likely when you go in for one of those checkups and your doctor, or maybe the physician's assistant, or the nurse says something that you just really don't understand, but you're already a little anxious, or you have that white coat anxiety. You don't have a lot of resources in that moment to make decisions in the executive brain, so you don't ask for clarification. You go away from the room, and what happens to you? You just keep running the conversation over and over and over in your head. So by the time you get to me and you've been running that conversation for a while, it takes a little bit of practice to calm that nervous system down. So that's why we think, no matter how you're going to birth, one of the best things you can do is give yourself hypnobirthing education. Together, we start from the beginning, with little mini exercises that help you to calm your nervous system. I mean just breathing alone—that's what I was forgetting to do when I was trying to get on here. If I only stopped to calm my breath, I would have been able to change my whole physiology. But, you know, I didn't do that. Because all of that blood was going away from my brain. And it was getting ready to help me take flight.

Scary birth stories and what Lara calls “mood spread”

So Lara, have you ever sat in a scary movie and been really afraid?  That’s what we call a movie trance.  Even though you knew that wasn’t real, you still had that reaction, right? Where you started breathing a little heavier, perhaps your heart started beating faster.  The subconscious mind doesn't know the difference between what's real and imagined. Anxiety is really worrying on steroids.  So one of the things that happens when you have anxiety is that you keep replaying it in your mind, over and over and over gain.  And pretty soon your subconscious mind takes it as the truth. So you can have little fear or little worries stacking up, and then what it turns into is what I call scary fear. So even if you're not particularly fearful of birthing itself. You can start running your fear trance. That  takes the whole joy out of pregnancy. And well meaning friends, when you say that you’re going to do hypnobirthing or that you’re going to have a natural birth, they have to give you their advice. They go on to share their scary story, and that causes fear in you.  Or you attend a reveal party and you’re obviously pregnant. And so somebody strikes up a conversation with you, and then before you know it everybody is sharing their scary birth stories.  The people who are saying “I had the best birth experience…” those people usually remain silent.  

What can we do?

Breathing

So what we can do first thing is to harness our breath.  Any time you take a deep breath in and you take a longer breath out, you’re going to be calming your Vegas nerve.  We ask women to take a deep breath in to the count of four, have a pause, and then slowly let it out to the count of eight. Just a few breaths like that—as short as 30 seconds, 45 seconds—and you can change your whole physiology, calm your nervous system down. And you can go about your business. Sometimes you can come up with something brilliant to say.  Blood has not drained from you head, and you’ve stayed off the fight or flight treadmill.  

Counting breaths

Lara:  It gets me thinking about what works.  One of the things that worked well for me in labor was that my husband would hold up a certain number of fingers and I had to take that number of breaths.  

That's just really excellent because what that's doing is it's asking you to focus. You're changing your thought pattern as you focus on that and then you have to execute a task, which highlights a different part of the brain. And although women like to think that we can hold two thoughts at once, we really can’t. So that helps you to get down off that platform of fear and have your own focus, which is really important. 

Stroking & touch

And another thing that we teach that's really easy for people to do is to just stroke yourself softly, allowing yourself to feel this type of movement. It's really nice when your birthing companion does it but if they haven't gone into the appointment with you or if they're not standing there when somebody is telling you a scary birth story. Research shows that stroking your skin will do the same thing as taking those calm breaths. It soothes the nervous system. So just when I'm doing that I just kind of go into a light trance.

Yawning

The other thing that works is yawning and stretching out, because those are things that you do when you’re relaxed.  We are changing the physiology of the body. So if you force them, then you’re going to go into that relaxation response.

Breath breaks

We are so stressed as women. We have busy careers. At the time that we're getting pregnant, it's usually the time that many of us are trying to climb up that corporate ladder. Are we going to say no? No. So we have the stress of the looming deadlines, the stress of all of the hormones changing in our body, and we just don't take time to think "I deserve some self love, I deserve some relaxation." So that's one of the things that we stress in hypnobirthing is that every day you need to take breath breaks--five breath breaks a day where you are mindfully breathing. And then when you come home, you want to practice your self hypnosis, because that's gonna put you in that relaxation, what we call the healing room. Just allow yourself to be in that bliss state. And the more you practice going into that state, the easier it will be to get in that state, and the more natural it will feel. Right now our stress state feels natural. In fact, many of us don't know who we are without stress.  

Get started

Check out Sacramento Hypnobirthing and learn more.