Love Month Reminds us to Celebrate and Nurture the Loving Relationships in our Lives

    VANCOUVER, BC, February 12, 2010 /24-7PressRelease/ -- The month of love is here, reminding us to celebrate and nurture the loving relationships we have in our lives. As a parent we know the loving relationship we have with our child is the foundation for their healthy socio-emotional development, and forms the basis for the adult they will become.

Parents have the power to foster the parent-child bond by their caring support and nourishment of all of their baby's developmental milestones from crawling and walking to babbling and talking, and from intellectual understanding to emotional control. The best way to exercise that power and to nurture the loving relationship is for parents to understand their baby's unique needs, from their baby's perspective, as they develop and mature during the first years of life.

David Elkind Ph.D, child psychologist and chief scientific advisor of the website JustAskBaby.com offers these four key tips for nurturing a healthy parent-child bond in baby's first year:

- Use a Baby Led Parenting Approach:Infants are social beings and they do best when they feel that their world is a safe, nurturing place they can trust and that their parents are trustworthy. Establishing this sense of trust is at the heart of attachment parenting. This approach starts from the assumption that each baby is unique and has his or her own pattern of habits and preferences. Attachment parenting means getting to know these habits and preferences and adapting our schedules to them.

- Decipher your Baby's Cues: Through his or her cries and actions the baby communicates fears, likes, dislikes and needs. Keeping your eyes on the baby is the best way of deciphering his or her behavior. What the young infant needs to know is that the world is a safe place and that his or her needs will be met. This means picking up the baby and finding out where the discomfort comes from, hunger, wetness, irritation and so on.

- All Interactions are Multi-Faceted: When you talk to your baby while you are changing him or her you are making physical contact, emotional contact, as well communicative contact. Whatever activity you engage in with your infant, feeding, bathing, changing, playing, make it as total an interaction as possible. Touching, hugging kissing, talking, singing while engaged in infant care make it a powerful experience that reinforces the infant's sense of trust, while providing stimulation for all parts of the brain.

- Build a Positive Image: The mental image your child has of you is directly related to how reliable you are at meeting their needs. Babies learn to recognize expressions and moods, especially their mothers, and that's important to creating a good parent-child bond. And a good parent-child bond, coupled with effective communication, helps your baby grow up with a healthy self-image.

The attachment a baby develops towards their parents in the first couple of months is the foundation for all the social and emotional bonds that build up over time. The best way to help this attachment develop is by being responsive to a baby's needs and tending to them positively. More helpful tips for nurturing an infant's full developmental potential are available at http://www.JustAskBaby.com

About Just Ask Baby

Just Ask Baby is a website that offers parents science-based information on the social, emotional and intellectual development of their children in the critical early years. This information is delivered through high-quality, streaming online "TV shows," which are filmed from a baby's perspective to enable parents to discover their child's world. The website offers more than 60 videos covering the first year of a child's life, and also gives members access to blogs, articles, forums and their own personalized web pages. The content on Just Ask Baby is completely unsponsored and ad-free. For more information visit http://www.JustAskBaby.com/media

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