28 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
The Affect of a Nurturing Environment on Babies
If survival is the brain’s most important priority, safety is the most important expression of that priority. This is the lesson Harlow’s iron maidens teach us. Babies are completely at the mercy of the people who brought them into the world. This understanding has a behavioral blast radius in infants that obscures every other behavioral priority they have.
How do babies handle these concerns? By attempting to establish a productive relationship with the local power structures—you, in ...
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1 Babies that have their needs met grow up to be regular children, babies that are neglected, even in just the first four months, grow up to be gang members.
28 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Children are Scientists
Thousands of experiments confirm that babies learn about their environment through a series of increasingly self-corrected ideas. They experience sensory observations, make predictions about what they observe, design and deploy experiments capable of testing their predictions, evaluate their tests, and add that knowledge to a self-generated, growing database. The style is naturally aggressive, wonderfully flexible, and annoyingly persistent. They use fluid intelligence to extract information,... 1 
notes
notesThey explore, test hypotheses, and record everything in memory to understand the world.
21 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Motorskill Milestones in Infants
Typical Month of Onset
Gross Motor Skill
1-2
Holds head erect and steady
2-3
Lifts head and chest with arm support on tummy
Sits with support
3-4
Rolls tummy to back
6-7
Rolls back to tummy
6-8
Sits alone
8-9
Pulls to stand
9
Crawls
9-10
Walks with handholds ("cruises")
11-12
Stands Alone
12-13
Walks alone
Typical Month of Onset
Fine Motor Skill
birth
Reflexive grasp
1-3
Pre-reaching (ineffective)
3
Voluntary grasp
4-5
Successful reach and grasp
6-7
Controlled reach ...Folksonomies: infant development motor skills
Folksonomies: infant development motor skills
Two charts of when to expect certain motor skill achievements in infants in the first year and some months.
29 JUN 2011 by ideonexus
How the Mother-Infant Bond Grows Over Time
Evidence that there is some sort of heightened awareness by mothers, caused either by biology or emotions, is seen in a mother's ability soon after birth to recognize her infant by smell and voice alone. In several studies, mothers who had spent only a few hours with their newborns were able to smell out their babies when comparing their shirts with the shirts worn by other babies. Mothers are also pretty good at hearing their infants. Women with new infants in wards usually sleep through the...Mothers grow more attached to their babies as their interactions grow so that the mother can better identify her baby and respond to its cry.
29 JUN 2011 by ideonexus
The Importance of the Mother-Infant Bond
In the 1960s a slow revolution in birthing practices began in Western culture. As a result of the influence of John Bowlby's attachment theory and Harry Harlow's infant monkey experiments, the medical establishment realized the importance of physical proximity on the bonding process and babies were not necessarily removed to the nursery. The feminist movement in the 1970s, which helped women assert their wishes, furthered that revolution as it gave female nurses and mothers the support to dem...Mothers separated from their babies are more likely to abuse them, while bonded infants are more responsive.
29 JUN 2011 by ideonexus
Shortening a Baby's Crying Duration
What seems to work best is simple human contact. Peter Wolff long ago demonstrated that picking up a baby works better than anything else to stop any baby from crying. In another study, infant researchers BeU and Ainsworth showed in the 1970s, with a sample of twenty-six infants, that consistent and prompt response by the infant's mother is associated with a decrease in the duration of infant crying. Urs Hunziker and Ronald Barr recently took this idea even further when they experimented with...Nothing works better than carrying the baby and responding quickly to its needs.
29 JUN 2011 by ideonexus
Weening Among Human Ancestors
Archaeologists have discovered that since the Pleistocene, humans lave always suckled infants for several years. Using biochemical analysis given human population when its children moved from breast milk to other foods. In one group of skeletons from South Dakota dated between 5500-2000 b.c., children were apparently depending on food other than mother's milk by the time they were twenty months of age.^' Recorded history also tells a similar story. Middle Eastern groups in 3000 B.C. were brea...Folksonomies: evolution breastfeeding
Folksonomies: evolution breastfeeding
A survey of ancient cultures and estimates of when they weened their children onto other foods.
17 FEB 2011 by ideonexus
10,000 Injuries to Infants a Year from Cribs, Playpens, a...
An estimated 181 654 (95% confidence interval: 148 548–214 761) children younger than 2 years of age were treated in emergency departments in the United States for injuries related to cribs, playpens, and bassinets during the 19-year study period. There was an average of 9561 cases per year or an average of 12.1 injuries per 10 000 children younger than 2 years old per year. Most of the injuries involved cribs (83.2%), followed by playpens (12.6%) and bassinets (4.2%). The most common mecha...Cribs accounted for of 10,000 injuries per year to infants.
