What babies need most from their parents is love. Not just emotional love but active love- holding, stroking, kissing and nursing. They don’t need black and white flash cards or cradles that rock themselves.

As newborns become infants and then toddlers, they go from helpless flailing to rolling over and crawling. As parents, we often watch their struggles to coordinate and control their movements with a mixture of pride and helplessness. We want to help them succeed.

Annie Brooks, a Certified Body-Mind Centering Practitioner and a Licensed Psychologist, offers parents something else- she teaches parents how to support their babies developmental movements and actions.

“Body-Mind Centering is a dialogue with the body and all it’s systems- the bones, muscles, fluids, cells. It’s an active integration between the systems working with desire, movement and education,” says Brook.

What that means for parents is a practical and simple way to help build a foundation for their infant’s development.

In essence Body-Mind Centering, developed by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, allows a baby to naturally grow and learn. Brooks advises parents to keep their child naked and shoeless as much as possible. Full range of movement and skin contact stimulates the proprioceptive nerves that affect balance and coordination.

She also encourages parents to get on the floor with their babies. Not only is it good for the baby to see you face to face but it also gives parents an opportunity to view the world from their children’s level. Putting babies on their bellies some helps their brains create a base of support in the cerebellum.

Brook worked with my then five-week-old daughter. Sabrina was having trouble breathing at night. I wanted to see if Brook could help.

After washing her hands, she asked if it was OK to hold Sabrina. She held her gently and talked to her about what she wanted to do. She stroked her feet and watched her wriggle and squirm. Then she put her fingertips on her face around her nose gently massaging her. She said to her, ”Tell us your story. How was it to be born so quickly? How did it feel to have those tubes in your nose and mouth? Tell us what it was like.”

Just like new mothers want to tell everyone their birth story, so do our babies. They need to process it too. Brook and I were being witnesses to Sabrina’s birth story.

Brook talked to me about our inclination to interrupt our babies and our children from the tasks they are engaged in. With babies, we often don’t recognize their involvement- it looks like nothing. But we do them a disservice by scooping them up without telling them what we are doing. One example gave me was when we wanted to turn Sabrina over onto her back, I just started to do it but Brook stopped me and said to tell her and to brush her cheek in the direction of the turn so she feels like she is initiating the turn. It was a level of respect and awareness to a newborn I had not experienced before. Stroking a baby’s skin all the way to her finger and toe-tips is another example of sequencing to the endpoint. As a school counselor, Brook saw how kids could not follow through with tasks and believe it is in their bodies as much as their minds.

“Our bodies and minds develop along a continuum and we need to experience and develop all along that continuum to be healthy,” said Brook.

Copyright © 2002 Anna Stewart. All rights reserved worldwide.