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.
Q&A: Follow-up on tummy time
This is a follow-up to our previous Q&A post where we responded to a question about tummy time on a pillow.
We've heard back from the parent, who sent new photos that we're happy to share as they beautifully illustrate our points.
NOBL Change at Work Conference
We're honored to have been included in a virtual conference in March 2020 called Change at Work: Leadership, Resilience, and Remote Work in a Post-COVID World. It was hosted by NOBL, an organizational design firm.
We talked about our philosophy and values, and our focus on teaching touch and handling skills to parents and other caregivers. See the amazing visual summary created by Craighton Berman.
Thoughts on Meeting a Baby
In our work at Babies Project, we meet new people every day. Many of them are babies. We’d like to share what we’ve learned from our experiences, with the support of our values, principles and ongoing conversations and questions. We offer this in the hope that it might lead to more fruitful, mutually enriching meetings between babies of all ages.
Developmental Movement: On Track or Behind?
A good part of our work at Babies Project involves talking about developmental movement— what it is and why it's important. The topic comes up in our discussions with parents and caregivers who bring their babies to Babies Project, often with questions like these:
“Is my baby on track?"
"Are they behind?"
"Should we be concerned?”
Our Values (the long form)
At Babies Project, the principles we teach, play, facilitate, explore and live from arise from our core values of agency, comfort, curiosity and movement. We believe these values are embedded in developmental movement, and they can guide us to be more responsible, resilient, interdependent, self-regulating and relational.
Developmental Movement for Babies & Toddlers: A Body-Mind Centering® Approach
The study of developmental movement is the study of how we learn to move in our first years of life. In Body-Mind Centering®, we specifically study the basic movement patterns, reflexive pathways and integration of our senses, as well as the progressive layering of rhythms, experiences and relationships that help an infant find a sense of self, integration and ease.
About Infant Developmental Movement Education (IDME)
All of our classes for caregivers and their babies are taught by IDMEs (Infant Developmental Movement Educators) who have been trained and certified by the School for Body-Mind Centering, and are Professional Members of the Body-Mind Centering® Association.
IDME training includes four core developmental movement courses in addition to two 10-day modules focused on working with infants. This training takes place over several years and includes over 500 hours of course work, observations and sessions.
Babies - Guidelines for Caregivers
We developed these guidelines as a way to help orient families to our approach and our space. They were sent to caregivers before their first visit to our by-donation Babies! sessions in our space in Manhattan (2017-2023).