Parenting Tips for Babies

Parenting tips for Newborn

What is Skin-to-skin contact:

Skin-to-skin contact, also called kangaroo mother care, helps the newborn to adjust to the environment outside the womb. It regulates the baby’s heart rate and breathing.

It is important for the baby to feel your presence, hear you and smell you. Not only that it helps you to develop a close bonding with the baby, but also stimulates the release of hormones that support breastfeeding. With kangaroo care, you can comfort or calm your baby and it relaxes you as well.

There are multitude of benefits with skin-to-skin contact for both the mother and the baby, but I’d emphasize one important point – it provides a sense of security. The baby feels secure in the arms of their mother.

Do babies talk?

It is recommended that both the father and mother do some ‘baby talk’ with the newborn. Communicate with your baby in a soft tone. You can talk, sing or read to the baby. Babies observe your facial expression and watch your mouth as you make some sounds. It encourages the baby’s speech development. The more you talk the soon your baby starts responding. Try changing the sound of your voice, high-low, fast-slow, quiet-loud to observe baby’s reactions and the hearing capacity.

Help them with their movements: Use some toys like a rattle, a bell or anything that makes some sound, in front of the baby. This way you can encourage your baby to lift his/her head to see them or move his/her hands to hold them. You can place some musical instruments like a piano near the baby’s feet. The baby reacts to the sound and tries to move his/her legs to hear the sound again.

Apart from the regular activities like feeding the baby when hungry or dressing them up, spend some time with the baby talking, giving eye contact, smiling at them, cuddling them which are very important in newborn care.

Parenting tips for infant babies

By now, your baby can see you, hear you, feel you and even touch you. So, do the baby talk more often. Read, talk and sing to the baby. Respond to the sounds the baby is making by either repeating them or adding some sound.

Move colorful objects in front of the baby: Babies get attracted to colours. Move colourful objects left to right and up and down, slowly. Observe the baby’s eyes. They try to follow the object. You can also show some colorful pictures and talk about them with your baby. Remember, one to three months babies can see things when they are in a range of 20 to 30cm.

Smile and laugh with the baby: By now, the baby learns to smile in return. Play some games, something like tickling, of course gently, that make your baby laugh and giggle. Spend some time cuddling the baby and comforting the baby.

Parenting tips for toddlers

Your baby has crossed a big milestone and now successfully entered the next phase of life. By now your baby starts to crawl. You need to take care of certain things like keeping the floor clean, giving safe toys for the baby to play, and being attentive.

1. Interact more with the baby, Encourage them to explore new things in their surroundings.
2. Say the baby’s name as much as possible
3. Smile and cuddle more
4. Start feeding purees of fruits and vegetables (for a 6 months baby, you can give the baby anything except honey).
5. Play with your infant games like ‘hide and seek’, peek-a-boo, finding an object, etc.
6. Tell the names of family members, relationship, names of the objects to the infant
7. Help them say some simple words
8. Teach them some gestures, bye-bye movements
9. Help them identify and memorize some objects
10. Perform activities that develop their eye-hand coordination skills – like taking the toys from container and placing them back on their own, and stacking up things and letting them fall to stack up again
11. Keep appreciating them, yes, right, very good, and very well done.

Parenting Tips for Pre-schoolers

1. Always try to be happy in front of them
2. Ask questions and encourage the child’s attempts to respond
3. Engage in fun activities together
4. Talk to them while feeding, bathing, and dressing them up
5. Read stories
6. Help them with counting
7. Help them with the identification of shapes
8. Encourage the child to socialize

Once your child steps in the mid-childhood, you can follow the Do’s and Don’ts for Good Parenting to make your parenting job easy or manageable.

Happy Parenting