by Shannon Lane

Created on: March 09, 2010   Last Updated: March 20, 2010

New parents, hear this and understand that you can not in any way shape or form spoil your infant. Your baby is brand new to you and everything around your baby is brand new to them. The development of your baby is so fast and each stage brings new needs and challenges. But your first stage as is your babies first stage is communication and comfort with one another. A new baby fresh into the world with all of its lights and noises and the vastness of the unknown is going to immediately begin to communicate. This very basic form of communication comes through the cry of your baby. You will not know right away what each cry means or how to show your baby that you understand. However rest assured that picking them up when they cry is not going to spoil them. You still have a few more years to go before the issue of spoiling your child will come into effect. You must be assured that holding and comforting your new baby is only showing them that they are in fact being heard. I worked in the daycare industry for a while and I only worked with the infants. I loved every minute of it. With each new baby came a new set of needs to learn and react to. Holding them and cuddling them was the easiest part of my job. Now here is the kicker, I was reprimanded for spoiling the babies more than once. Not by the parents mind you, but by the other teachers in the room. They believed that by holding a child and giving comfort was taking away from other children in the room. I saw things in a completely different light.

As a parent, I would want someone to pick up my baby and give comfort when needed. This was the majority answer when I did finally go to the parents and ask their advise on each and every infant in my care. My question was simply this, would you rather your baby cry itself to sleep or would you prefer that I rock him or her to sleep? Every parent I asked looked at me as if I were from another planet and answered me with the same response, they did not want their baby to EVER cry itself to sleep. I felt assured that my holding and loving them was not a negative action yet an expected one.

I then took my issue to management and called the other teachers to the carpet for the way they preferred to interact with the babies in the infant room. I was never told by management not to hold the babies when they needed to be held. I even had to go as far as leaving my position as the result of witnessing blatant neglect from the other teachers. Neglect that was not dealt

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