Bond with your child as an infant, they'll love you for life
Written: Jan 09 '05
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Show great massages that help with bonding and relaxing your baby.
Cons: Encourages massaging into older years, which I see could be an issue.
The Bottom Line: Great book if you are looking for ways to help your child relax and sleep. Also, develops an appreciation for the parents in the child's head.
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| biscuitfarmer's Full Review: Vimala Schneider McClure - Infant Massage: A Handb... |
It is said that if you take the time to bond with your children while they are very young, they will remember those moments subconsciously, and will have greater appreciation for you as parents into adulthood. Personally, I believe totally in that statement. I believe the more love and attention that you give your children from birth, both mother and father, the more apt they will want to do whatever they can to please you as they grow older. One of the newer methods that is under huge discussion, is infant massage, which is discussed in detail in this book.
Concept
The overall concept of the book is that if you take a newborn and you spend the time and let them get to know your touch and know that you are there for them at all times, they will grow to have a greater appreciation and respect for you. The idea is to find ways to bond with your child, without physically having to take them out and do things with them. This is a special way that you can start it before they are older enough to talk or really do much of anything but eat, sleep, and poop.
Chapters
Chapter 1 - Why Massage your baby?
This chapter pretty much sets up the entire book. It talks about the benefits of massage for you baby, both for you and for the baby itself. What the skin stimulation does and how it can help the baby. It also talks about things like the roots of massage with infants and how it has grown throughout time.
This is a great chapter that really brought the book into perspective. It taught me pretty much that babies have a lot of issues with their skin as it is so thin early on in life. So, the massaging, helps to move the blood around, and create a more colorful healthy skin color, while promoting new skin growth and removing dead skin. As babies don't move around as much as an adult would, shedding of old layers of skin, isn't quite as normal of a process as it is for us. So, the massaging of the skin aids in that and eliminates a lot of the gray looking skin that many infants experience. There are other things that I found helpful, such as the issues where a child can receive too much love. I personally, believe that you can love your child all you want, but if you don't show them how to behave in public or how to be social, then they are going to want nothing but to be around you as the parents. So human interaction is extremely important.
Chapter 2 - Your baby's sensory world
This pretty much just goes through the babies sense of smell, touch, hearing, sight, things of that nature. Talks about how your interactions with them help to develop those different areas.
While this section wasn't exactly too much to do with the massage itself, it talked a whole lot about how babies are different than adults in the area of senses and how they react differently to stimuli than we would. A smell that may be annoying to us, may not even be noticeable to them, things like that. Pretty much this chapter is just informational and helpful.
Chapter 3 - Bonding, Attachment, and Infant Massage
This is where the book starts to take shape. They get into the basics of infant massage and what it entails. Other major areas of discussion are the actual act of bonding with your child, whether it be as an infant, or later on in life and the impact that it could have depending upon when you choose to truly bond with your child. Other things that are discussed are items such as daycare for infants and whether or not this is a good idea or not.
I love this chapter as it gets into the effects of different periods of bonding. What happens if you were to wait and bond with your child when they are 10 and playing basketball or something like that? Sure, you bonded with them, but it was so late in time, that a lot of the trust that should have been built up over the years, may not be there. Talks about the thought process that generally happens subconsciously where your child may choose to do something or not do something based upon whether or not it could physically bother you. For example, if your child is acting out in school. If you would have bonded with them early, would they have had more respect for you, that they would have thought about whether or not you would appreciate it and just the thought of upsetting you, makes them not do it.
It pretty much says children are like animals. When you take your dog to use the bathroom outside, your dog does it because if your dog goes inside, it gets in trouble and upsets you. Your dog just wants to make you happy and impress you, so your dog is going to go outside. Sometimes it can be fear too, but generally the dog wants to make you happy. Your child can be the same way, and depending upon when you take the time to bond with your child can affect that.
Chapter 4 - Especially for Fathers
Talks about a lot of the issues with fathers and not wanting to take that moment to bond. Many men find that it's not very "manly" to physically show affection. This book disagrees with that age old concept. It goes to point out how showing love to your child at a young age, will make your child much more willing to come to you with issues when they are older. This is especially true with males. Males would rather have a man to man talk with their father than talking to their mother about many issues. If the father doesn't take the time early to open the door for those types of conversations, the child will most likely avoid them altogether.
I personally, am a big supporter of being loving in front of your child and showing emotion. I think that any strong male that is comfortable with who they are can admit that they have feelings and teaching your children that is extremely important. I strongly believe that those early bonding moments can really make a difference in the child's life.
Chapter 5 - Helping baby learn to relax
Many babies freak out over the smallest things, but that's because they aren't totally aware of their surroundings yet. The books goes into ways that you can calm down your infant and make them feel more comfortable in a wide variety of situations. They go into things like touch relaxation, where your touch soothes your baby and even into things like holding your child's hand being extremely relaxing to them.
This section opened my eyes to the little things that you can do in order to make sure that your baby knows that you are there for them. Babies are very into 'touch' and like it whenever their parent touches them. (except during diaper changes apparently) So, by you taking the time to hold their hand, rub their back, whatever you do, you are soothing them and calming them in the sometimes tense situations. When they are afraid they don't want to be left out to fend for themselves, they want to know that you are right there with them.
Chapter 6 - Music and Massage
This is a great chapter, that shows different methods to relaxation the baby. Talks about the use of stories or music which will help to soothe your baby. It does however say that you should still continue to rub their back lightly, hold their hand, rubbing it gently, and things of that nature. By doing this, your baby will feel completely at ease in the world and the music will filter out the scary noises that make them nervous and generally cry.
It was kinda cool to hear about how stories affect infants. Pretty much the story doesn't mean a thing to your child, however, studies have shown benefits to reading at a young age to your child, towards mental growth. However, it is believed that reading to your infant, allows them to hear your voice more, relaxing them, and they begin to understand words and sentences slowly over time until eventually they begin to talk. Reading to your child, is a method that helps your child to talk a little sooner and learn to use regular language at a much younger age. Whether that is a good thing or not, I have no idea, as I'm not there yet.
Chapter 7 - Getting ready
This is the actual chapter that talks about the massages that you can use, the oils that you can use, positioning, how to keep them warm, when to do it, how often to do it, how much pressure to use when you do it. This section completely covers the area of infant massage.
This is the actual bread and butter of the book. I'm not sure why it takes until Chapter 7 to get into the book, but it does, and you learn a lot of great things about your baby along the way. It's amazing how your child will respond to the massage. At first the oils are somewhat scary, but after about 5-10 minutes, they calm down and fall asleep. I find that this is a great method for putting our son Jordan to bed. I just take out his "massage" pad and oil him up and start gently rubbing him. His body is tense at first, then he kicks his legs and arms out and just lets me do my thing while he goes to sleep almost instantly. It's really kinda funny to watch. Then when you stop, sometimes they'll wake up, but usually, they are out for good.
Chapter 8 - How much to massage your baby
This section is somewhat odd, but really it tells you how to "ask" your baby if you can massage them in certain places, like their stomach, feet, back, whatever you want to massage at the time. It's pretty much an approach that allows you to ease into it, without them screeming. I find that you can just sort of go for it without all of the foreplay. I figure it's a child, not your lover. While you need to show them that you love them while doing it, you don't need to seduce them either.
Chapter 9 - Crying, Fussing, and other baby language
Great section that goes into great detail about why babies do some of the things they do. Things like crying, fussing, throwing their arms around, things like that are all discussed and explained.
This section was somewhat self explanatory. If you haven't figured out why they are doing certain things at this stage in the game, then you aren't going to be sleeping much, because baby is never going to stop crying. This stuff is pretty much just learned from being a parent, just let this stuff happen.
Chapter 10 - Minor Illness and Colic
Talks about things like chest congestion, minor cough and things like that. Has some ideas for how you can make your baby feel more comfortable during these times and what you can do to help relieve the problem. There are other topics such as gas and colic that they talk about.
All I have to say is... thank god my baby doesn't cry! I don't have any colic issues, no gas issues, and my baby just sits and stares at me more than anything. I have one of those baby carrier things too, and he just kinda bobs around with me all over the house.
Chapter 11 - Your premature baby
This is a chapter that goes into what you do if your child just happens to be premature. The massages are a little bit different. They talk about different things to look for with a premature baby and how to help them through it. As my child wasn't premature, I didn't even worry about this section.
Chapter 12 - Your baby with special needs
What do you do if you child has vision issues? Has a learning problem? This section talks about the issues in your child's life that could become a big problem if you don't work on these issues early. Talks about what you can do to prevent some things and what you can do if you suspect your child has an issue, such as needing glasses.
Really well written chapter that helps those parents with children that have special needs. I personally found it helpful to just take my infant to the doctor and have them tell me if there's anything wrong. I found that to be a much more useful method than trying to self diagnose the issue.
Chapter 13 - Your growing child and sibling bonding
This is a really odd chapter which is more disturbing than anything. Talks about massaging your child throughout their years. While I think that this may be beneficial and I'm sure that you can create a closeness to your child that may be helpful in some way, I don't think it's logical. If you were to massage your 6 year old, they would go to school and tell them that mommy or daddy massages their legs and chest everyday and next thing you know, you have Child Protective Services at your door.
The concept is great and it would still work for them while they are quite young, I don't know if it's something that really needs to be continued past the age where they can walk and talk. I think that there are much better ways to "massage" their mind and emotions without having to result to actual massage. Besides, I can't see them sitting still long enough for you to rub them down.
Overview
Overall the book is a great read. Shows a lot of great techniques for ensuring that your baby is relaxed and calm. Very good method for putting your child to sleep and I notice that my son is a lot happier since we have started this. He sleeps longer, which is great, and he sleeps a lot quieter. He used to be a loud sleeper, but now he's completely peaceful.
The book has scary moments in it which talk about teaching your children to massage each other and massaging them throughout their young lives. While I see the benefits of it physically, the concept of doing it seems somewhat disturbing and unorthodox. I think that the issues that could arise because of this are far worse, than not massaging would be. I suggest reading to your child, hugging them, taking them to the park, things like that. Your child will still be bonding with you, and will grow mentally because of it.
Very little of this book actually talks about massage though, which is what I thought the whole book would be based on, since that's what it sounds like in the title. The book is still very good and very informative though, regardless of whether or not it was actually fully about what the title says it's about or not.
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Recommended:
Yes
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