1. Guiding Principles: Safety, Orientation, Comfort, Bonding and Curiosity
This is the first of four in a series of companion articles and recorded zoom sessions. It is part of our Preparing for Caring project to build awareness and educate about the importance of handling skills in caring for a baby.
We have built our work at Babies Project around the progressive states of safety, orientation, comfort, bonding and curiosity. In this post, we unpack these ideas.
2. Baby Ball: A Responsive Container
This is the second of four in a series of companion articles and recorded zoom sessions. It is part of our Preparing for Caring project to build awareness and educate about the importance of handling skills in caring for a baby.
At Babies Project, we often say that if we teach parents and caregivers nothing else in their first session, we teach them “baby ball,” a shorthand term for a recommended way of holding a baby. There’s a lot to unpack about baby ball - it encapsulates our principles, it’s relevant for babies of all ages, and it plays out both physically and metaphorically.
3. Four Surfaces: We Are Their Environment
This is the third of four in a series of companion articles and recorded zoom sessions. It is part of our Preparing for Caring project to build awareness and educate about the importance of handling skills in caring for a baby.
Building specifically on the ideas of “baby ball” and “horizontal is home base”, this post looks at the ideas behind one of our specific positioning suggestions – having a baby experience lying on all four surfaces of their body (back, front, left side and right side).
4. Picking Up, Putting Down, and What to Avoid
This is the last of four in a series of companion articles and recorded zoom sessions. It is part of our Preparing for Caring project to build awareness and educate about the importance of handling skills in caring for a baby.
In this final post, we’ll apply our principles to the moving transitions involved in picking up, putting down, transferring and repositioning a baby.
Handling Practices: Some Historical Context
We’d like to share a bit of context and history about our handling suggestions. Where did they come from? The short answer is that we didn’t make them up! There’s history behind them, though we do like to think we’ve honed, curated and elaborated upon them over the years.
Update: Preparing for Caring at Early Head Start
This is a December 2019 update on our project with Ellyce DiPaola, IDME and EdD candidate at Teacher’s College, Columbia University, which included offering our Preparing for Caring: Touch, Handling & Bonding Practices (PFC) workshop to an Early Head Start community in NYC.