Let’s state the obvious – the most important thing in your baby and toddler’s life is…you!
Yes, your little wonders need you for food, shelter, clothing and all those basic physical necessities. But just as much, they need you for all their emotional and psychological needs. Indeed, it’s your relationship with them that is the harbor that protects them from the storms of life, and the wind in their sails that gives them the confidence to dare the unbound sea.
Way To Baby™ gives you a fundamental way of being with your little one that has been shown through decades of research to benefit her or his well-being in innumerable ways.
These include:
- enhancing a primary sense of security and trust
- enhancing a sense of competence and mastery
- enhancing language and cognitive development
- enhancing the development of self-control and judgment
- enhancing the development of empathy
- enhancing the development of confidence, resiliency, and optimism
Ok, so it’s starting to sound like Way To Baby™ is an end-all, be-all that does everything but cure the common cold (actually, there are numerous studies relating emotional well-being and physical health!). You also might think you have to do something dramatically different from what you’re already doing – you don’t.
The Way To Baby™ approach provides a framework you can use with the methods you’ve learned from books and websites, and all the wonderful things you already are doing following your parenting instincts and intuitions.
Now you may be thinking Way To Baby™ is complicated and difficult to do – it’s not. In fact, it’s a simple, straightforward, and easily learned way of increasing your “emotional attunement,” which can profoundly effect how your precious one sees and relates to him or herself, others, and the world. For the research supporting the Way To Baby™ method, and more information, please go to www.waytobaby.com.
Given how important it is for your baby and toddler’s well-being, what exactly is “emotional attunement?” It’s all the ways in which you show you’re aware of and responsiveness to your little one’s needs, feelings, and states. It’s that sense of being totally in tune with her or him; of a harmony of the hearts, a synchronous connectedness, the two of you cocooned in your own magical bubble; it’s the most wonderful feeling in the world for both of you!
Ok, so none of us are always in sync this way. And our little marvelous ones can absolutely baffle and befuddle us, never mind strain, drain, and frazzle us to our wits’ end. But in the end, you know your little pumpkin better than anyone.
So Way To Baby™ gives you a means to focus and express your attunement in a way that can be immediately and directly experienced by your child.
And what exactly is this method? Essentially, you’re going to be a mirror with heart. You’re going to lovingly state to your little one what she or he is doing, thinking, and feeling, and how they’re “being” (all to be explained in the next sections). I know this sounds a bit silly, if not utterly inane. And, yes, do this to anyone much over age six and they’ll soon go loony, never mind feel paranoid as to what you’re up to. Ah, but for now your little bundle of joy basks and blossoms in your undivided attention and resonance.
In fact, it’s through this “empathic mirroring” that your baby’s unique little sailboat of “me” emerges out of that safe, sheltered harbor of “we.”
Although Way To Baby™ focuses on infants and toddlers, this reflexively reflective way of being with your child forms a mutually empathic, respectful pattern of relating between the two of you that can hold you together even through the turbulence of teenhood (yes, that day will come all too soon!).
Parts 2 through 5 will explain the method in detail, and demonstrate it with video clips.