The other day I had the opportunity to truly understand the long-term effects of attachment parenting or as I like to call it “intuitive parenting”.  A parent and neighbour offered to pick up my son from school as my daughter was sick.  But for very understandable reasons she forgot to get my son.  This had never happened to him  and his teacher doesn’t hang around.  Also his classroom is based at the edge of a large school away from everything.

After waiting outside his classroom for a time, my son decided to find our neighbour.  Luckily he spotted her with other Mums, chatting and watching their children play.

When they arrived home my neighbour explained what had happened and after my initial horror she said, ”he asked me why I forgot and I told him I’ve got a new baby, busy with kids and I’m often forgetful about things and I’m truly sorry.  Then he told me – that’s okay, I do that, I forget things too.”

Upon hearing this I secretly rejoiced.  My son had overcome as he later described it, his “half-frightened” emotion, made sensible decisions, processed another person’s point of view, empathised and moved on.

This situation happened the same day a piece on attachment parenting aired on TV and it got me thinking about my son’s response and how it related to my own parenting style.  So I took a look at the Attachment Parenting International API website, and I found something that resonates with my view of parenting,

The long-range vision of Attachment Parenting is to raise children who will become adults with a highly developed capacity for empathy and connection. It eliminates violence as a means for raising children, and ultimately helps to prevent violence in society as a whole.

The essence of Attachment Parenting is about forming and nurturing strong connections between parents and their children. Attachment Parenting challenges us as parents to treat our children with kindness, respect and dignity, and to model in our interactions with them the way we’d like them to interact with others.” (sourced API website).

While I believe in this style of parenting, others are not so convinced and I believe this is attributed to lack of understanding and the media sensationalising the extremes.  An example of this was recently in TIME magazine, where it highlighted a mother breastfeeding an independent three year old child as an example of AP, which of course it is, but it sends the wrong message.

What parents hear is the notion that if they don’t breastfeed for years, carry their child in a sling long after they can walk, respond to every need, they are not being a great parent.  I think this is a shame, because the truth is an attachment parenting home is not based on rigid parameters but rather common sense principles creating a home jam-packed with love which has only one way to perform in the world, to fill it with love.

“Toot, toot, chugga chugga, big red car” sings out daily in homes around Australia.  Though the tunes of the big red car will soon be ringing out anew, it will still be a favourite!  While it’s not important who your children enjoy listening too – Greg soon to be Gregoria – researchers at McMaster University, Canada have completed a study that shows babies benefit from exposure to music.  Leading to more smiling and communication, along with earlier and more sophisticated brain responses.  Now the big red car takes on a whole new meaning!

However, the key to this positive affect on babies – is interaction.  Passive listening of music in the background, in the car, turns out not to do a lot.  Babies need to be active participants of music through movement, singing, dancing, music playing and even signing.

So next time you feel like singing the big red car with your child, don’t forget to add the baby sign for “car”, side to side head sway, honking movements and of course the legendary finger wiggle!

Is it me or has everything beyond the necessities of parenting grown to mountainous proportions.  We are encouraged to factor into our parenting appropriate talk, structured play, sensible diets, self-esteem activities, and on top of that to model a loving relationship with our partner.  Don’t know about you but I suddenly feel very tired – lol (lower case).

Humour aside there is no mistaking that parenting has become a sophisticated undertaking and part of this insurgency is social skills.  More and more experts are talking about the importance of social skills, essential to a child’s success as it builds resilience, makes them more likable by other children and equips them for conflict resolution.  They also say that it’s not merely a natural course of events in childhood but a skill which can be harnessed through engaging parenting.

For a new parent, developing your baby’s social skills is easy. Have your face close to your baby’s face and pull funny faces, play tickling games and use silly voices, which all lets your baby know they are important. This creates an interaction that is self-fulfilling because babies will yearn for more and as adults respond to their yearning, creates a desire for babies to become greater social beings.

So forget all of those expensive baby toys. The cheapest and best toy for your newborn is usually right in front of them, and as a bonus you’ll never lose it under the car seat or down the sofa.

Of course as your baby grows, so do the social skills that you incorporate into your parenting.  The Baby Signs program is one of those skills you can enmesh into parenting once your baby gets a little older.  Starting when babies are around six months old; it’s backed by research, proven to provide babies with an early understanding of communication and most importantly broaden their social skills.

I found this very cute baby video that shows a baby imitating and enjoying the simple social interaction the adult is giving.

I’ve always believed in mother’s intuition, even more so when my daughter, less than two years old had a strain of flu she couldn’t shake. I was taking her to the doctors everyday because the antibiotics didn’t seem to be working and she was losing energy.

One particular day, I got a doctor who listened to her chest and said casually, “Your daughter has pneumonia, give her lots of fluids, continue medication and rest, along with pats on her chest to dislodge the mucus from her lungs”.

As I drove home I had a nagging feeling I couldn’t ignore.  Looking back it was my ’mother knows best’ voice distilling the doctor’s medical advice.

Convincing my husband, we took our daughter to hospital and discovered our daughter was very sick and she had to be admitted for over a week.  To this day, I’m thankful my mother’s intuition blared like our neighbours outside radio warding off magpies.

Recently in Northwest Argentina, another mother who I’m sure is thankful she tuned into her mother’s intuition, requested to see her stillborn baby 12 hours after she had been born. When they opened the baby’s coffin they found her alive.

Though stories abound, there has never been acceptance of the power of a mother’s intuition in science or even in the medical profession, that is until now. Psychiatrist and intuitive healer, Judith Orloff says, “Mother’s have an incredible radar for their children”.

Judith is an author of several books including a New York Times bestseller. Her latest book, “Second Sight: An Intuitive Psychiatrist Tells Her Story and  Shows You How to Tap Your Own Inner Wisdom” (Three Rivers Press, 2010),  chronicles the discovery of her own gift of intuition and her mother’s deathbed confession.

“A mother carries a child for nine months and the bond begins at the moment of conception,” she explains. It’s the initial physical closeness she believes that forms the basis for mother’s intuition, and over the years she has heard many stories about it.

Judith also says that electronic devices interfere with a mother’s intuition by blocking telepathic brain waves. If so, then for me this heightens the importance of the Baby Signs program as a vital tool for parents in early baby communication. Having your baby use signs such as “hurt”, “hot” or “cold” do more than provide communication between parent and child, it provides important clues to your baby’s health.

Now when a mother says ”I just don’t know, it doesn’t feel right”, I validate her and encourage further investigation. After all I figure, it could be a matter of life or death.

For more information about Judith Orloff http://www.drjudithorloff.com/

If you google baby sign language you’re sure to get a lot of results. But what you may not realise are all of those results derive from the years of research by Dr. Linda Acredolo & Susan Goodwyn. In fact, today’s parents almost don’t give it a second thought when they incorporate baby sign language into their families lives, but in 1982 the idea of using signs with hearing babies and babies understanding them? Well that really was a very far-fetched concept.

So how did baby sign language start? It started one day organically when Linda’s twelve month old daughter Kate used the gesture of “sniffing her fingers” when she heard the word “flower” or saw a presentation of it. On that day baby sign language was discovered, and it was discovered in a natural environment within the scared relationship between Mum and daughter, with not a clipboard in sight!

However, in order for anyone to take this natural interaction seriously, research needed to be done. Luckily for parents Linda was a child development researcher, who took her daughter’s gesture to mean more than just a random movement. Dr. Linda Acedolo teamed with Dr. Susan Goodwyn to research this natural interaction and what they found was babies desperately wanted to communicate and that they understood more than what they could say. They all used intuitive, natural and simple signs to express themselves – the Baby Signs program was born.

So next time your baby does something and you just put it down to coincidence, or perhaps just a quirky thing, think about the Baby Signs story – maybe it will be the start of something great.

Dr. Linda Acredolo & Susan Goodwyn wrote the ground-breaking book, Baby Signs: How to Talk to Your Baby Before Your Baby Can Talk, published in 1996 which quickly became a bestseller (over 400,000 copies sold in the U.S. alone and translated into 14 foreign languages).

Below is a video of Sam out with his parents using the Baby Signs program to communicate.

When I became a parent, co-sleeping with your baby was deemed a big fat no no.  As a new parent I always put my first born in his cot, never entertaining the idea of co-sleeping with him or any other baby, or so I thought.  The day my daughter was born I discovered that she only settled when nestled between my chest and arm, with her head on my shoulder.  In that position, she was calm, contented and it felt like the most natural thing in the world for her and for me.

Yet in spite of literature to hand, and a midwife taking my daughter out of my arms while she slept; I chose to co-sleep with my daughter.   While the world “tut tutted” over this, I heeded my primordial parental instincts; and responded to my daughter’s communication cues.  Turns out in latest research, it’s not such a bad idea; if done safely.

There are some interesting articles that talk about the latest research, indicating that in situations where certain things are avoided; co-sleeping with your baby can be safe.  People who are not advocates of the concept air on the side of caution. What are your thoughts? http://www.askdrsears.com/topics/sleep-problems/sids-latest-research-how-sleeping-your-baby-safe , http://www.abc.net.au/gnt/future/Transcripts/s1058920.htm .

A great video with different views involved in co-sleeping with your baby.