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How to avoid spoiling an infant

You bring your new baby home and you are ready to face a new adventure. You will get much advice on how to help meets the needs of Little One and a lot of the advice will be great. To help you decide what is valid advice and what is not, take a look at infants from birth to nine months.

Often others will talk to you about spoiling your child. Let's explore the theory of spoiling and meeting the needs of Little One.

1. Infants have one way of communicating their needs, crying. You can call it fussing, fidgeting, whimpering or full out crying that is the only way they call tell you something in their world is astray.

2. In this age bracket infants can not anticipate the future. They do not possess the cognitive skills to say "I am going to cry until I make everyone in this house tense and all attention is on me."

3. Unless you are a mind reader, and if you are please feel free to stop reading, when Little One begins to fuss you must go through a list of possible issues.

Child development experts tell us between birth and nine months children learn basic trust and secure attachment (bonding). How do we help with this?

Erik Erikson, a famous psychiatrist, tells us the sense of basic trust learned in the first nine months of a child's life develops a core of the baby's character. If the baby is uncomfortable and their needs are met in a relatively quick time frame, their world becomes peaceful again; he will be an optimist. The bumps in the road of their little life get handled and they are happy again.

So when Little One is crying it is your job to respond. A creative parent will try out a number of ways to respond so they aren't stuck in the same corner of the house bouncing the Little One because that always seems to work. Here are some ideas or thoughts.

1. Little One hates it when is time to change clothes. You can't skip it, but maybe you can figure out the distress and make it less uncomfortable. Maybe it's the cold factor and changing in the warmest place you can find will help. Maybe you are trying to stuff Little One into an uncomfortable scratchy outfit with soap residue. Maybe you don't have the outfit prepared with the buttons all undone and ready to slip on. Perhaps you feel anxious about the situation and that makes Little One anxious.

2. Little One just wants to be held. Hold Little One a lot. It is a good bonding experience and expose him to other things that he may enjoy as well. This is a good place to stop and tell a little story that may be helpful.


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How to avoid spoiling an infant

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