Preparing for Caring:
Touch, Handling & Bonding
How a baby is handled affects all aspects of their development:
their patterns of perception, their problem-solving abilities,
their emotional well-being, their cognitive functioning,
and their sense of agency in the world.
Free Infant Handling Resources
Sharing infant touch and handling skills with parents and other caregivers from a developmental movement perspective has become a main focus of our work at Babies Project. It is a tangible way of putting our values and principles into teachable, learnable, shareable practices.
We (Sarah and Amy) have spent thousands of hours sharing, discussing, and evolving these ideas and practices with hundreds of families over the more than 10 years we’ve worked together with babies and caregivers. We’ve had the joy of watching it play out as babies learn to move themselves in gravity and space, and we continue to learn from the feedback every baby’s unique journey offers.
We’ve developed a Preparing for Caring workshop to teach infant handling skills to people preparing for a baby in their life, and a companion illustrated document with some of the practical suggestions we’ve found most helpful.
We send this document to parents and caregivers in advance of their first session as a way of saying “here’s where we’re coming from.”
Our Preparing for Caring document includes:
An introduction to and overview of Babies Project;
A one-page version of the principles and values we work from; and
A one-page illustrated overview of our handling suggestions.
The document has been translated by colleagues, all of whom are also trained and certified through the School for Body-Mind Centering®, and is available for download below in English, Spanish, Finnish, French, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Slovak – with additional languages in the works.
We believe practices that help us care for ourselves and each other should be offered freely and shared widely.
Free PDF downloads (Brazilian Portuguese, English, Finnish, French, Italian, Slovak, Spanish)
Articles and Zoom recordings unpacking the ideas
A playlist of short videos demonstrating some of our handling suggestions.
Turn on audio or closed caption for the narration.
Why handling matters
The tasks of caring for a baby are numerous and repetitive. While they might be routine and task-oriented for the caregiver, they are potentially big experiences for a baby.
Because they are repetitive, even small changes in a caregiver’s habits and choices can add up to a significant difference in how a baby’s development is supported (or impeded).
Handling tasks are opportunities for relationship, engagement, participation and co-regulation between the caregiver and baby. They are moments that can help build secure attachment and a felt sense of a safe home base.
Teaching handling skills
In teaching handling skills to parents who bring their babies to developmental movement sessions, we’ve frequently heard responses such as “I wish I had known this sooner,” “That makes so much sense” and “Nobody ever taught me this!” There is clearly a gap and we want to help fill it.
Our training and our way in to working with people is movement-based. Handling skills are movement skills, and they are learnable and teachable.
We developed our Preparing for Caring workshop in 2017 as a way to offer our principles and handling suggestions to people (often before they have a baby), giving them a chance to learn about and intentionally develop their handling skills and habits.
In January 2020, we offered the workshop to several parenting groups at a community center in East Harlem. In preparation for this outreach effort, we developed an illustrated handout for the participants — something we had wanted to do for a long time.
We spent the month of May 2020, early in the pandemic, on an awareness campaign that included a series of short articles and online events to unpack the information, answer questions, and gather feedback. You can find links to these and related resources below.
About our illustrated handout
The illustrated handout was developed to go along with our Preparing for Caring workshop, and in conjunction with our outreach to an Early Head Start community in NYC. Now we’re using it as a way to start spreading the ideas and suggestions more widely, making them freely available to anyone who’s interested.
We’ve published the principles and handout documents with a Creative Commons copyright that allows sharing and adapting the work for non-commercial use with credit. Our intention is to encourage collaboration and reuse, while preserving the source credits and lineage of the work.
Our principles and the handout have been translated into several other languages with the support of Infant Developmental Movement Educators and BMC teachers around the world. The principles and handout are currently available in English, Spanish, Finnish, French, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Slovak.
Preparing for Caring
free download
Preparing for Caring (and related) articles
See below for a series of companion articles and Zoom recordings (from May 2020) where we expand on and discuss the ideas in our handout. Each article includes the associated Zoom recording.
Preparing for Caring by Babies Project is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at https://babiesproject.org/preparing-for-caring/.
Please contact us at babies@babiesproject.org with your inquiries, comments and questions.
Text: Sarah Barnaby & Amy Matthews
Illustrations: Joanna Cotler