Your Baby Is Speaking To You

Book Review: 5/5 Impact On Me (Book By Kevin Nugent)

Read more about the book here

I read this book a second time after 5 years, as our second baby was born. I rate its impact on me 5 out of 5. It taught me how to understand an infant better than any other book. It armed me to see infants as more than just crying: I learned to notice different types of cries and much else.

Touch and physical care

Touch is the first sense to develop. Infant massage helps lower cortisol, improve sleep, and support weight gain. Skin to skin, or kangaroo care, helps preterm babies regulate temperature.

Vision

Newborns can see objects about 1 to 1.5 feet away. They prefer faces to objects and bold colors to soft pastels. They see high contrast better and will follow objects moving close by. When they get excited, their heart rate and breathing slow down, which is a good thing.

Sound

Babies like rhythmic sounds: beats, lullabies, rattles, and known voices.

Yawning

A yawn means the baby is taking a pause. Closing their eyes briefly stops interaction between the baby and the other person.

Feet

A baby’s feet curl around your finger and also around their own feet when they touch their feet together. It is a way for them to self-regulate their body boundary.

Sleep position and tummy time

SIDS can happen when babies sleep on their tummy because the lungs can collapse under the weight. When the baby is awake, tummy time gives their legs and arms freedom to move. Put them to sleep on their back.

Crawling

Babies can crawl soon after birth when placed on the mother’s tummy; they move toward the breast. On their tummy, they use their arms and legs to get into a crawling position, which also frees their airways.

Reaching and grasping

Before they have full motor control, babies already reach with their hands toward what they want. They grasp your fingers; doing this during breastfeeding works well too. By two months the baby’s hands mostly stay open. By three months the grasp is not only reflex but intentional.

Early steps and crawling

Babies can take first steps very early if you bear their weight, or when their body is submerged in water and buoyancy helps. Their muscles and nerves are not yet strong or developed enough to walk properly. Proper crawling usually starts around 9 or 10 months.

Self-soothing

Babies sometimes put their hand in their mouth to self-soothe by sucking and to keep themselves awake.

Hunger

When the baby is hungry they start searching for the breast.

Fussing and crying

Fussing is a low-energy signal that the baby is nearing a pain point. They are not yet crying; it is better to address the problem before they cry.

Hunger cries start soft and become loud and rhythmic. A pain cry is a single shriek, then a short silence, then continuous loud crying, sometimes with breath holding. Babies do not produce tears until around two months old.

Sleep

Infant light sleep is REM: you see eyes moving and the body moving. In deep sleep there is no movement.

Smiles

A sleep smile can come from dreaming or from a pleasant sound or a known voice. A discovery smile appears around 4 to 8 weeks: the baby frowns and puts in effort to identify the source, then smiles.

Cuddling

Cuddling with the baby releases oxytocin in the adult. That is positive reinforcement. Some babies do not want to cuddle. That can feel like rejection to the parent.