If you follow Pediatricians’ recommendations, Tummy time (lying down in the prone position) will be the longest 3 minutes of your new baby’s life, too.

At about day three (postpartum for a baby carried to term), it’s time to give your infant the opportunity to develop even musculature in the neck, arms, and upper body.

If you’re like most new parents, you don’t even try to fight the urge to make it all better at the sound of the slightest whimper.    Well, tummy time will be one of your first tests of parenting resolve.  Babies don’t seem to like it much.  At first.  Expect mild protest.  That’s normal.

In my years of consulting experience (hundreds and hundreds of hours, sitting on living room floors, playing) the only babies who don’t mind tummy time are the ones who have mastered it.  There are ways of making the minutes move along.  Here’s a list.

What To Do During Tummy Time

• Tummy time is only for a few minutes.  A maximum of 3-5 minutes, a couple of times per day until your baby masters and enjoys this exercise;  then you can increase.
• Tummy time is for parents, too.  Your baby must be wide awake and you must supervise for the duration.
• Don’t practice tummy time in the crib — that’s where the research-endorsed position of back sleeping takes place.  Comfy blanket atop clean floor is perfect.  Pets behind closed doors — even better.
• Offer a toy.  It will distract your baby from the initial discomfort of this new activity.
• Offer a book.  A tiny, cardboard book with one well-defined image per page will help pass the tummy time.  Place book 8 inches from baby’s face, then tap a page and say the name of the item in the book to help baby learn to focus attention.
• Offer a sibling.  This new workout starts three days postpartum, remember?  All the way down to the floor and back up again?  You might need someone to spot you, Momma.  While parents supervise, older siblings can get acquainted with baby, and learn appropriate limits on play, personal space, and exuberance levels with your newborn.
• Use your judgment.  Your baby might complain bitterly about tummy time — and who knows the reason?  Just observe your baby, and respect those limits.  Try again tomorrow.

Really.  Try again.  Tomorrow would be a good time.  Due to important research leading to “Back to Sleep” recommendations for infants, parents will need to set aside time to create the tummy-only opportunities to build strength, sharpen depth perception, coordinate movements, and appreciate body awareness.  All of those abilities lead to the later milestones of crawling, cruising, walking, running, and playing sports.

Given the increasing rates of worrisome childhood obesity, it seems the responsible thing to do is to give a newborn bodies and brains the message that there is work to do in this life.  And that they can do it.

I know, I know.

It seems like I should tell you: “How Not to Wake a Baby After You’ve Finally Rocked Him to Sleep.”

Or it maybe the title could address a more likely challenge:  ”How to Wake a Teenager.”

I’m sticking to my title:  ”How to Wake A Baby.”  And Why You Should.

Some babies are sleepy to the point of not having much interest in eating.  Newborns need a steady supply of food for their rapidly growing bodies and brains.  It takes at least 8 feedings every 24 hours to supply adequate nutrition and hydration.  If your baby goes longer than 4 hours between feedings, she needs a gentle wake-up call from you.

To make the waking up experience easier for both of you, take these gradual steps:

• Avoid waking baby from the deep sleep state of consciousness, if you can.  But — if five hours have passed since the last feeding, wake her, no matter what stage of sleep she is in.
• Gently remove baby’s blankets, then some clothing.
• Change baby’s position by picking her up, and holding her in your arms.
• Change her diaper.  Talk to her as you do.
• Massage baby’s limbs to stimulate wakefulness.

In general, it is normal for new babies to sleep up to 16 or even 20 hours out of a 24-hour period.  The sleep is broken up into approximately 2-hour intervals — and newborns don’t know the difference between night and day.  This daily schedule (or lack thereof) can be exhausting for parents, but the rhythm changes gradually over the next several weeks.  By the age of four months, babies will still wake up at night, but they will begin to develop the self-soothing skills to regulate themselves back to sleep.

Then he’ll follow you with his eyes.  Within a couple of months, he will smile.  At you.  On purpose. While he’s awake.

That is called the “social smile.”  And it’s a big deal when he decides to lay one on you.

The social smile is such a huge milestone because it brings together many other elements of your child’s development.

Cognitive Development and Body Awareness

Let’s review:  Your baby smiles at you, on purpose, while he’s wide awake — he clearly recognizes your visual representation (aka “face”).  He has been carefully observing your mouth and facial expressions, then pairing that information with the sounds of what you say.  The rhythms, too. A baby who smiles socially, or smiles back at you when you smile, knows how to take turns.

Emotional Development

Your prompt, consistent attention to his needs means that as the newborn develops into a settled baby, he can stress less about his problems, and enjoy life, his body, his family, his home a lot more. Your smiling tot with the good memory enjoys the experiences he associates with you, and knows that the love fest goes both ways.  His smile is the product of your investment in plenty of pleasurable face-to-face time.

Social Development

Your amazing baby instinctively knows what adults need to research in order to realize:  that a large part of our communication is non-verbal.   A baby capable of the social smile is a baby who has the maturity to ask for what he wants (more face time!), in a positive way.  He has outgrown his 100% reliance on the earlier strategies of cries and cues.

For babies, “smile” is a big word, and a big part of their growing language and social skills. The baby who learns to take turns will be able to make “conversation.”  The toddler who takes turns will be able to make friends.

Your newborn’s previous address was insulated against sound, wind gusts, sudden movements, and bright lights.  He never knew hunger — instead he enjoyed a steady and constant supply of nutrition.  He drifted in and out of a blissful haze of napping, stretching, napping some more.

Compared to that personal paradise, life on the outside can be challenging.  Your child now has to learn the complex processes of experiencing needs, alerting you about the needs, then waiting to see what happens.

Your baby will also take on some of the self-care task of regulation.  When excessive stimulation intrudes, he will attempt to shut out the stimuli by turning away, withdrawing, becoming irritable, or even crying or sleeping.  He will show his appreciation for your efforts to soothe him by quieting when you comfort him.

Parents can lessen baby’s stress by observing the cues of overstimulation.  Maintain a household environment that is easy on the senses.  Keep the daily care routines easy for your baby to predict.  Within a few weeks, you’ll be able to notice that your infant reacts when he sees the bottle or breast.

Setting aside time for meaningful interactions will make a difference, too.  By 3 months of age, your child will show excitement by increasing the movements of arm and legs when he recognizes a toy that he enjoys.

Your careful parenting work will pay off.  Signs that your newborn is becoming a settled baby (12 to 16 weeks postpartum for babies carried to term):

• Communication evolves from cries and cues to purposeful, joyful conversations.  Favorite sounds abound.
• Multitasking.  He will be able to nurse and reach for a hand to hold.
• He will like to see your familiar face.  He’ll enjoy exchanging smiles, too.
• Baby develops hobbies, like nibbling on his feet or making saliva bubbles.
• He learns to fall asleep more independently.
• Temperament becomes more consistent.

Within a year, baby will become toddler.  A toddler who can wave “bye-bye”, imitate you, respond to phrases with actions, and know when to say “mama” or “dada.”  He’ll be a fully functioning member of the place you all call home.

It sounds so urgent, looks so awful, and it does a new parent’s head (not to mention self-esteem) in when they feel unable to help their baby.

That’s kind of how crying is engineered — to be unpleasant.  To motivate you to solve the problem to which baby has just alerted you.  Yes, crying (“stress” translated into baby language) is contagious, but so is calm.

Before you pick up your baby, get a grip on yourself.  Do something to dissipate your anxiety  – something to calm you.  You could breathe … sigh … genuflect?

Clear your tension, so you’ll be able to focus on the work at hand.  Like translating your baby’s language of the cry.  By 3 to 4 weeks of parenting, you’ll have the skills to hear and decipher the different cries and their different meanings.

So your baby is speaking “Cry”, this mysterious, loud language.  Look on the bright side — by crying, your baby is expressing her belief in two important principles:  1) that her needs are important enough to speak up about, and 2) you will help her.  Later, she’ll add a third basic belief to her system:  Trust.

The calm and confidence of trusting you and the world you’ve provided will have a directly soothing effect.  She might even cry less.  Why shout when a whisper will do?

In an earlier blog post on emotional development, I discussed the varying states of consciousness (six of them) that newborns cycle through during the day.  During each day, which means they’re all normal states.  Only two of the states (so-called “fussy” state and the “crying” state) involve full-on howling.

Most of the rest of the time (in the other states of consciousness), your new baby has better things to do — like socializing, observing, listening, getting acquainted, nursing, or chillaxing (a fierce combo of chilling + relaxing).

If (okay, when) the crying does break out, however, hunger is understandably the usual suspect, and many new parents attempt to soothe a cry with food.  A rather safe guess, especially for breastfeeding moms.  It’s not easy to measure how much milk your child actually consumes during a session at the breast, and the amount quickly changes in response to changing nutritional needs.  So why not try that solution?

Then there’s the fact that babies often calm upon nursing.  So regardless of whether or not your infant was really hungry for that feeding you just offered her, the sucking might have soothed her.  Mystery solved, it seems.  Unless the crying continues.

Crying, without other hunger signals, could mean that hunger is not really the issue that baby needs your help to resolve.

More tomorrow on deciphering crying and what your baby really wants to say.

Yesterday, I talked about how crying is engineered to produce a response from parents and caregivers.

Just as an adorable baby is irresistible, an upset baby is difficult to ignore.  We have an instinct to want to make things alright.

I think crying is an amazing accomplishment on your baby’s part.  This is the sound of your resourceful baby, already organizing her communication skills into a message.  An attention-getting one, eh?

By the time you have been on the job for about a month, your skill level will catch up to hers!

You’ll begin to recognize and differentiate the tone, pitch, volume, and urgency of her cries.  You’ll respond more quickly, and more accurately.  She’ll learn to trust you to meet her needs.  In the process, you will all settle into being a securely attached and confident family.

Parents often suspect hunger as the cause of the cry.  With baby needing to take in nourishment 8 – 12 times in each 24-hour period, that might be a good guess some of the time.

Continued crying, without other hunger signals, could mean that hunger is not the issue that baby needs your help to resolve.

• She might feel sick. This possibility worries new parents the most.  You should worry less.  Most of the days of her life, she will have a range of needs that you’ll be able to respond to without medical help.
• Your newborn could be uncomfortable. She just relocated from her own personal climate-controlled nudist colony, to a diaper.
• Again, with the discomfort. She might cry if she’s too warm.  She might cry if she’s too cool.  Hey –  some things confuse even me, so that’s all I got on this one.  You’re welcome.
• She might be tired. Swaddling is a way to calm a new baby by helping her to regain some stability in her body, and control over her limbs.  Some babies like to be swaddled in a way that allows freedom for a favorite thumb.
• What if she’s lonely? Once she finds out all that cool stuff you’ll do for her, she’s going to want you to do all that cool stuff for her.  Like rocking, holding, counting her toes, gazing, smiling.
• Lonely, schmonely.  She might be overstimulated.  At first newborns will fall asleep to ward this off, but later, she will develop much more of an interest in spit bubbles, playing, smiling, all that.  How much goo-goo, gaa-gaa can a gal take?  She’ll let ya know.
• Then there’s the diaper change. A full diaper is a likely target of her disdain.  From day one, she’ll be producing a couple of wet diapers, and one or two soiled ones.  Within a week, she will QUADruple her daily output.

Your baby might be trying to tell you a number things in the relatively small amount of time she spends crying.  Most of the rest of the time, she will be busy with other things like bonding, finding her hand, looking at stuff.  When crying does come up, it is a natural sign of healthy development.  Especially language and emotional development.   A cry for help is her way of putting into words her expression of faith that the help will come.

The human brain begins forming just three weeks after conception.  At peak development, the cerebral cortex creates 2,000,000 (wait let me count the zeros… yep, that’s two million) synapses every second.  Yes, every second.

Some of these connections form in utero so that reflexes and breathing can be in place at birth, yet others form when stimulated by:

• Baby’s environment (Mother Nature nominates you, Mommy),
• daily interactions (nomination seconded!), and
• the emotional transactions that lead to secure attachment (you just won yourself an election, little lady).

Every experience — from playing giggle games  to realizing that a loved one (a bigger, more capable one) appears in response to a cry, — touches and strenghthens specific circuits while leaving others untouched.  Think “guy at the gym who pumps a lot of iron, but obviously never works out his legs.”

Unused connnections prune themselves away.  As they should.  Streamlined neural porcessing makes the remaining connections more efficient.  Think “it certainly is easier to find the things I need in my pantry now that I’ve tossed the food that nobody was eating”.

By two years of age, a toddler’s cerebral cortex contains a density and quality of neurons that far surpasses adult levels — well over a hundred trillion.  I don’t even know how many zeros to put.  I used to know, but I stopped using the hundred-trillion part of my brain…..

The developing brain (the childhood brain) is far more responsive to stimulation than an adult’s brain.  This is termed “plasticity.”  The most revolutionary finding in neuroscience is the confirmation that all brains, new and old, have the regenerative power of neuroplasticity.  But in this area, especially, babies remain even brainier than the rest of us.

Your baby is in cahoots with Mother Nature.

Together, they lure you (and any other helpless adult) into feeding, touching, talking to, listening to, and bonding with the newborn members of our species. About twelve inches from target is the best distance for a newborn’s built-in binoculars to see most clearly.

You play into their hands every time you position the highly-favored roundness of your face and your eyes’ rounded irises approximately that distance from your baby’s face — an inevitable consequence of breastfeeding.

Your new infant also appreciates the easy-to-see contrast between light and dark.  That’s why you’ll notice his gaze fixed on your hairline, your eyebrows, and even your moving mouth — you are talking to him during feedings, right?

Your Baby’s Physical Tools

Within the first moments of life outside the womb, your baby has reflexes that help ensure survival.  Some reflexes are strongest in the hours following birth, but subside, then disappear, within days or weeks.  Just in time for mother to bounce back from the labor of … well, labor.  And delivery.  One of the most powerful of these survival tools is the rooting reflex.  When a nipple (or even a finger) brushes by his cheek is touched baby’s mouth opens, and his head turns toward the stimulus, as he searches for the breast.  What comes next, a strong sucking action, is another survival strategy.  Your baby’s perfectly engineered taste bud system and mouth are ready to receive whatever nutrition he manages to extract with all that rooting, hoping, searching, and sucking.

Your Baby’s Psychological Tools

Just as day-to-day Mommy rebounds from the postpartum period, layer by later of Mother Nature’s innate physical protections for the newborn melt away — to be replaced by parenting skills.  Different states of consciousness can be observed (think “hints-on-how-to-handle-me”).  No longer living in a climate-controlled, sound-insulated womb, baby learns to rely on strategies (like falling asleep in a roomful of noisy voices) to ward off sensory overload. Learning to ask to have his needs met is another valiant attempt to communicate.  My work with babies and their parents has shown me that the seemingly complex relationships between new baby and nervous parent could be much simpler, with the addition of a few tools to the parenting kit.  The moms, dads, and caregivers who learn how to observe and recognize the distinct states of consciousness will soon learn how to respond to cues, and therefore, needs.  In the school of life, displeased babies issue loud progress reports.

States of Consciousness

It might seem like there are only two states of mind for a newborn:  crying or not.   Your child is much more interesting than that!

Here are some notes for your upcoming pop quizzes:  To assess what state of consciousness your baby is experiencing, observe the level of physical activity, facial expressions and activity, breathing rhythms, responsiveness to people and things in the environment.  There are six-count-em six distinct states of consciousness that your little one will experience during the day:

• Deep sleep — my mother used to call this “sound asleep.”  That makes sense.  During this state, the baby seems oblivious to sounds, or siblings, and most other stimulation for that matter.  This is what people mean when they say “slept like a baby.”  It’s not a great time for attempting a feeding; it is a great time for caregivers to rest.
• Light sleep — there’s a lot of activity during this kind of sleep.  Fluttering eyes, sucking motions, and body movements in this state can be confusing to new parents.  It’s actually a very normal state that accounts for a lot of newborn sleeping time.
• Drowsy, but awake — I call this “to be determined.”  It really could go either way.  Your baby might sleep more, or wake on up.  He will  respond to stimulation but then again, he might have a good cry.
• Quiet, but alert — Great time for feedings, conversations, hugs, or tapping on the pages of a cardboard book.  An infant’s bright eyes, fully open, signal that he is receptive to paying attention and receiving attention.  If you shake a rattle, and he’ll look at it.  Speak his favorite language (parentese), and he might move his mouth, too.
• Active and alert — Some parents call this fussy.  Baby might be getting hungry, he might want some space, or he might want to be soothed by you.  Observant parents will note that this isn’t the best time for playing, or chatting, but it’s a great time to make sure baby is comfy, and that the environment isn’t overwhelming his senses.
• Crying — Okay, so you’re new at this, and you didn’t quite handle the “fussy” window of opportunity to his liking.  No worries, you’ll get more chances.  And you’ll get better at it.  Just so you’ll know, most babies under 3 months old have crying periods, especially toward the end of the day.  It’s important to respond immediately, knowing that it is impossible to “spoil” a baby under six months of age.  If he can soothe himself, let him.  If he needs your help, give it calmly.  Just be glad he still tells you what’s on his mind.  That will change in about 12 years.

At my health club, there’s a chart.  It tells me exactly how hard I should be exercising, depending on my age.  Just between me and the chart, I refer to my true age look up my preferred, healthy heart rate, and check it once or twice during my treadmill trip.

Even well-prepared parents are startled by the difference between fantasy and the hard work of being responsible for another human life.  A helpless human life, unlike a colt or a baby chick, will not function in a recognizable way (just simple walking, basic talking) for at least a year.  What happened to the breezy, easy visions of baby lotion, smiles, and naps?

Parents need one of those chart things. How many lost hours of sleep are in the optimum training range?  The danger zone?  How much reality can you take per day?    By reality I mean tummy aches, tears and snot — but enough about what happens to dads during diaper changes, let’s get back to talking about the baby.

Maybe the chart could answer questions like:

• Really?  That fist thing is normal?

• Can she even see me?

• This cry sounds different, what does it mean?

• When will she smile?

• Why is he staring at my mouth?

• He hates being on his tummy, are you sure it’s good for him?

• It’s supposed to look like mustard?

Okay, Parents, tell me what’s on (or off) the charts in your parenting experience:

1.  Do you feel that post-natal parenting support is of the same quality as prenatal support?

2.  Do you feel that post-natal parenting support is of the same quantity as prenatal support?

3.  Is your pediatrician more or less of a resource than you thought she/he would be?

4.  Who/What are the primary influences on your parenting style?

5.  What actual or potential parenting issue worries you most?

Look for a summary of the feedback in a future issue of Milestones, the MommyGarten e-newsletter.

Learn

[Parent function]:

to observe, to know what to expect from your baby, when to expect it, and what to do about it.

Learn \’lərn\

[Baby function]:

to stare at, wonder about, poke, shake, experiment, smile at, taste, and drop.  Several times per day, during the first three years of life.

To a child development geek like me, the word “learn” has fascinating origins.  The ancient languages that gave us this word first described learning in terms of footprints, furrows and tracks.  Considering the process by which experiences shape the brain, and leave a physical trail of life’s experiences, it is clear that the old schoolers were intuitively aware of principles of neuroscience that would not be (could not be) confirmed for centuries.

Here are some images that remind me of how new experiences stimulate the infant brain: Envision walking along, leaving your footprints on a soggy beach when the tide is coming in.  The faint impression is there, but shallow, and not necessarily permanent.  Now think of a well-worn path that suggests itself as the best way to cross a yard, or hike a hill.  Those repeated trips across the terrain are analogous to how repeated experiences shape the brain.  On the beach or nature trail, our feet make the journey.  In our brains and bodies, electrical impulses carry information between brain cells (also called neurons).

The path of great persistence wins out in neuroscience.  Experiences make impressions, but repeated experiences lay down tracks and become more deeply grooved/organized with more and more usage.  Conversely, lack of stimulation leads to weak neuronal connections, and eventually a winnowing away of what could have been a connection.  And all of this happens incredibly quickly:

• Hundreds of millions of cells are made in baby’s brain before birth.
• At six months of age, baby’s brain is 50% of what the adult size will be.
• At three yeas of age, baby’s brain is 80% of what the adult size will be.

Most of the learning (brain development, really) that happens to your child, will happen with you as the teacher.  Under your tutelage, she will learn the life skills of walking, asking for help, self-dressing, self-feeding, curiosity, how to make friends and how to keep them, crying her heart out — but somehow smiling again.  Before her first day of formal schooling, she’ll already need to understand rules, responsibilities, the surprisingly complex business of using a bathroom, that fork vs. spoon thing, and how to love herself and others.

Your baby’s first classroom will be the world that parents show her.  That classroom will be as interesting or as boring, as authentic or as artificial, and as large or as small as the world you help her to experience.