Tuning into your baby
This blog post is an edited extract from an interview with clinical social worker Lauren Porter in Pinky’s series of interviews with experts: ‘Early Loving Early Learning, loving ways to make your babysmarter’ (http://www.pinkymckay.com.au/earlylovingearlylearning/
Attunement is a word that sounds like what it is - tuning in to your baby. The essential bit about attunement is that you need to always be doing a scan of yourself, trying to calm yourself and asking yourself, “Am I tuning in to me, or am I tuning in to my baby? Am I tuning in to advice I’ve had?”
A lot of times, we will hear moms, dads and other people who are caring for babies talk about their babies in a way that, as an outsider, we can say, “Hang on a second! That doesn’t seem like that baby to me.”
You’ll hear a mom say maybe, “He’s really stroppy and demanding.” Yet perhaps as a professional, we’re watching a mother who’s not feeding a baby when they’re showing signs of hunger. Then the baby does get quite grizzly and what would seem demanding and hard to settle.
What’s happening for that mom is that she’s tuning in to herself, either advice that she’s had or just her own personal experience of possibly not ever being tuned in to as a baby herself.
She thinks she’s responding to her baby and she thinks she’s reading that this baby is difficult or stroppy or whatever the word might be. In fact, she hasn’t achieved attunement. I don’t mean this as a judgment because we all fall down in this in various ways.
I think the idea is to be quite gentle with ourselves, but also to be quite persevering and to try to question ourselves, not to the point of creating madness, but just taking a second and thinking, “What is my baby trying to tell me?”
Throw out any notions you might have, and just for a second consider them more as wonderings or questions in your mind as opposed to certainties.
Just say, “Let me just see how my baby responds. What does my baby seem to be saying? Is my baby settling when I do this? Now, the book might say that my baby should settle, but does my baby settle? Does my baby like to be held this way? How do I know?”
How do you know what your baby likes? If you can ask yourself those questions or if you have already asked your baby those questions, that’s the process of attunement. It’s tuning in and getting on that wavelength where you just feel like you know your baby. That will change over time.
It’s the type of thing when someone comes to visit your baby and says, “Can I have a hold?” and you say, “Yes, sure. He’s a bit colicky at the moment, so he quite likes to be held like this.” You may pass the baby over with hand on tummy, showing the visitor how to hold the baby. That’s simple attunement that moms and dads do all the time.
You just instinctively are in step with what your baby’s needs are in that moment. Mothers don’t see this as a big deal, but it is quite a big deal because to the baby it says, “I’m understood. You get me. You’re there for me in a meaningful way.”
Lauren Porter is co-director of The Centre for Attachment (www.centreforattachment.com), a member of the external advisory group for the NZ government task force on child maltreatment, a member of the Attachment Parenting International research group and executive secretary of the Infant Mental Health Association of Aotearoa, New Zealand. Listen to the complete interview –and others from Pinky’s series, ‘Early loving, early learning, loving ways to make your baby smarter’ at
http://www.pinkymckay.com.au/earlylovingearlylearning/
