Studio3Music Blog

Posts Tagged ‘babies’

Apr
13

Two and Three Months: From Head to Hands

I was going to call this “From Head to Toe”, as a baby’s motor skills start with her head and eventually make their way down to her toes, but by three months, motor skills have only really made it as far as her fingers, and even then, not really well.

Nathan thinking that the best way to help his 3 month old brother to have a steady head is to hold him up by the ear...

From Head

If you remember from the last blog on month one of your infant’s life, the head and neck are the first body parts a baby learns to control. This ability aids in visual perception. In order to be able to focus your eyes on an object, you have to be able to hold the image still, even when your head or body or the object is moving.

In addition, to see clearly, the brain has to coordinate gravity and movement sensations from the inner ear (the vestibular system), and sensations from eye and neck muscles. Babies are born with all the necessary pieces of the visual system in place, but can’t use them properly yet. They have to literally learn to see.

At first, infants have to move their whole head to move their eyes. But around 2 to 3 months, infants learn how to shift their gaze from one object to another without having to move their head. (As a side note, it’s not until between 4 and 6 months that babies can see the colors blue or violet. So when your 3 month old doesn’t jump for joy every time she sees those purple striped nursery walls you so carefully hand-painted, just wait a month or two.)

Just as the sensations of gravity stimulated the part of the brain that activated the neck muscles of the one month old, the same sensations stimulate the brain to contract the muscles in the upper back of a 2 and 3 month old. Your baby is literally commanded by his brain to raise up his head and upper body when laying his tummy.

Since your baby’s brain is stimulating those muscles, tummy time becomes of utmost importance. I remember Rob’s Occupational Therapist saying how important tummy time was for developing muscles in the back and shoulders, and that she was seeing a lot of Kindergarten and early elementary aged children for fine motor skill issues, and the connection between them seemed to be a lack of tummy time as infants.

One word of encouragement – if your baby doesn’t like tummy time, that’s okay. Keep trying. Frustration is the catalyst for change. Meaning… she’ll to pull her head and neck up with enough practice, because she doesn’t really want to see the carpet; she wants to see what is around her.

To Hands

As an infant begins to see better, he begins to reach for the objects and people in his space. Unfortunately, hand-eye coordination isn’t very well developed at this point, so he appears to be “batting” at objects with open hands.

When he does grasp something you put into his hand, he’ll only uses three fingers and the palm of his hand (not his forefinger and thumb). The touch sensations have yet to integrate with the sensations in his muscles and joints in his hands, but when that happens, he’ll be able to make that pincer grasp he will eventually need for the glockenspiel mallets in Young Child!

-posted by Miss Analiisa, who is amazed that children can go from floppy to walking in just 12 short months.

Tags: babies, brain, Miss Analiisa, parenting, physical development, sensory systems

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Mar
25

The Brain’s Busy First Month

Posted in Child Development

Last time I wrote about sensory integration, I told you what happens by the age of 7 if a brain is well organized. Now, I’m going to start at the beginning and tell you how it all progresses until then.

A Newborn’s Brain
At birth, an infant possesses all the neurons he or she will ever have (billions of them), and a nearly unlimited potential for connections between those nerve cells. They begin the process of brain development with nerve cells that have very sparse branches. During the first few years of life the dendrites (branches) of the nerve cells proliferate. Making these new neural connections is the basis for learning.

Rob at 2 weeks

Touch
A newborn can experience sensations (like the unpleasantness of a wet diaper), or the touch of his mom, but without these neural connections, he can’t tell very well where on his body the touch is occurring.

At this age, touching an infant is the most important thing you can do to help brain development. Every time an infant has a sensory experience, neural pathways are formed. The greater the number of neural pathways, the greater the brain power.

As any mom can tell you, infants loved to be carried and rocked. It is very soothing and calming to a baby. Why? The gentle movements she feels are actually helping to integrate her brain. The clue that this is happening? She’s happy. Her little brain is beginning to organize all the sensory input and thus learn to adapt to her environment. This makes her calm and happy.

Adaptive Responses
An “adaptive response” is defined as “an appropriate response to an environmental demand”. Here’s how it works in newborn as the brain begins to organize itself. If you put a four week old with her head on your shoulder, she’ll try to lift her head occasionally.

Gravity actually stimulates the part of her brain that activates the neck muscles that raise her head. The same thing happens with adults, but we’ve had so much practice at holding our heads upright that we don’t wobble. (And our muscles are stronger, too.)

By the time a baby is a month old, a baby should be pretty good at sucking. Sucking is an adaptive response to taste and smell, which scientists believe were pretty well organized at birth. A one month old will also be responding to the sound of a voice or bell or movement. These responses were already in the nervous system before he was born, but are actually “turned on” by the sensations of movement, touch and gravity that an infant experiences after birth.

If these adaptive responses don’t occur, the brain can’t integrate sensations properly. If that happens, then more adaptive responses (learning) are difficult later.

Rob’s Story
Here’s an illustration: Rob is our own sensory child. After two years of therapy, we hit a plateau that no amount of different therapies could get us past. When we took him to see a Sensori-Motor Developmentalist, he told us that Rob was missing a reflex that all infants should be born with. When an infant is sleeping on his tummy, one arm will usually be bent at the elbow and raised up next to his head. His head will be turned toward the bent arm.

If you put that arm down next to his body, and put the other hand next to his head (while sleeping), he will automatically turn his head toward the bent arm. In Rob, that wasn’t an automatic reflex. Just try this on yourself (while you are awake!) You’ll find it very uncomfortable NOT to have your head turned toward your upright arm.

For weeks, we moved Rob’s arm’s and legs in a Spiderman-like pattern while he lay on the floor on his tummy, until he could do it himself easily in all sorts of variations. We were essentially creating the neural pathways for this reflex. And guess what? He got “unstuck” and could then continue developing his adaptive responses and learn. And an organized brain leads to happiness. (Remember the infant you rocked?)

-posted by Miss Analiisa, who gets tired just thinking about how much work a one month old infant is doing!

Tags: babies, brain, learning, Miss Analiisa, physical development, sensory child, sensory systems

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Nov
18

New Mommies Brains Grow Bigger

Posted in Bits and Pieces, parenting

I always said that I lost brain cells with each child I delivered. It’s been my excuse over the last 12 years for all the information and appointments and tasks that seem to fall out of my head. However, some recent research I read seems to contradict that idea.

A recent Science Daily article says this, “Motherhood may actually cause the brain to grow, not turn it into mush, as some have claimed. Exploratory research published by the American Psychological Association found that the brains of new mothers bulked up in areas linked to motivation and behavior, and that mothers who gushed the most about their babies showed the greatest growth in key parts of the mid-brain.”

The authors of the study proposed the idea that all the hormonal changes after birth allow mother’s brains to reshape in response to their baby, and the instinct and drive mothers have to take care of their infant is the result of brain growth.

The researchers performed brain scans on women several weeks after birth, and again at 3 to 4 months post partum. They found that the mothers who most enthusiastically described their infants as wonderful, perfect, precious, beautiful, etc., were significantly more likely to have growth in the gray matter of their brains linked to maternal motivation, rewards and the regulation of emotions.

What made the authors believe that this brain growth was linked to motherhood was the fact that in adults, gray matter volume doesn’t normally transform over a few months without significant learning, brain injury or illness, or major environmental change.

So the questions arose. Does the constant touching, holding, cuddling, between a mother and baby cause her brain to “orchestrate a new and increased repertoire of complex interactive behaviors” with her baby?

Does growth in the brain’s “motivation” area lead to more nurturing by the new mommy, which in turn helps her baby thrive? Does behavior change the brain, or brain change behavior?

Finally, is it possible that post-partum depression reduce the same areas in the brain that grew in the non-depressed moms? Is there something in these findings that could help them?

More research is definitely needed. But these results are interesting, to say the least. So in the meantime, go ahead enthusiastically gush about your baby to everyone!

-posted by Miss Analiisa, who recommends that you continue to enthuse about your children when they are older. It’s beneficial for both of you.

Tags: babies, brain, Miss Analiisa, parenting

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Aug
26

I’m so embarassed.

Posted in Child Development, Our Time, Village

When your mom is a Kindermusik teacher, you get to play with ALL the scarves!

The following is taken from an email one of our Kindermusik moms (and newest teacher!) sent to our Studio3Music teacher loop. It’s an amazing inside perspective, and we thought you’d find it interesting as well.

Right about the time that Samantha turned a year old, her behavior shifted dramatically in class (at least to her mom). She went from sitting in my lap quite contentedly and grinning at me to being more and more independent.

The last couple of months, she’s gotten so mobile that I often spend most of the class (again, at least it feels like it to me) chasing her around the room and keeping her out of mischief. It was SO frustrating when she first started doing it (which was also about the time her “selective hearing” got crazy, too, and she stopped listening to me call her back), and I admit, I was really embarrassed.

I had no idea why my kid couldn’t keep still in class for more than 10 seconds (when I’m lucky), and why she seemed intent on taking everyone else’s instruments, knocking down their towers, and attempting to pillage the toys behind the sheets. It really felt like my kid was the only one behaving this way, and I started to wonder if I was doing something “wrong” or if Samantha just wasn’t getting anything out of Kindermusik anymore.

There were days that I came home feeling totally exhausted and confused. However, since y’all had already hired me, I decided to attempt to stick it out. ; )

Let me first say that I place none of the feelings I felt at the feet of the amazing teachers we’ve had. I know had I come to any of you, you would have helped me feel better. But I was embarrassed and felt that the “failings” were mine alone (can you tell she’s my first kid?).

As I’ve been going through the Kindermusik Educator training, this issue is one that is specifically addressed. I sat in my living room one morning and listened to part of a presentation about it. As the traits for the developing walker were discussed, I got misty-eyed. It meant SO MUCH to be told that my kid was not only “normal,” she was doing everything exactly right for her age. I realized that it was my expectation of her behavior that had to change, and that while she may not seem to be paying attention during much of class, she was still very much alert and aware of what was going on (which I can attest to – she LOVES her Kindermusik materials).

I’ve also realized this summer after attending some fairly wide age range groups that while it’s tiring to chase after her in Village, it’s a thousand times more so in an older class. The little ones don’t generally care too much about her rambunctious nature, and the parents laugh when she sits in the middle of the room during an activity and covers herself in scarves or hoards shakers. This is SO good for her self-esteem to be the center of attention and to feel like a “big girl.”

With older toddlers, however, I have to keep her in arms’ reach because they get MAD (understandably!) when she exhibits the same behavior. The parents are always kind because they remember, but that doesn’t keep a 3-year-old from throwing a fit when Samantha takes the cards from his hands for the eighth time that day. She throws more fits during these classes and comes home frustrated sometimes. Again, NOT the teachers’ faults. It’s just that she’s not able to express herself during class and, well, it pisses her off. ; )

-submitted on behalf of Miss Chris, who declares “I’ve become a poster child for the ‘no Our Time before 17 months’ rule. I am so grateful for a safe, fun environment in Village class where Samantha can be silly and we can both truly enjoy the hilariousness that is her right now.”

Tags: babies, kindermusik, Miss Chris, physical development, toddlers

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Aug
12

The Wonder Weeks

Posted in Child Development, parenting

My friend Melissa has a little boy who is about 8 months old. One of the things that I love about Melissa is that she is such a conscientious mom. She does a great job of seeking to learn everything she can about Jackson’s development. I also love that she emails me questions, which means I get to learn new things, too.

A while ago she emailed and asked me about a book called The Wonder Weeks, by Hetty Vanderijt and Frans Plooij, both PhDs, who wrote this book based on 35 years of study.

What Vanderijt and Plooij discovered was that in the first 14 months of life, there are 8 major developmental leaps that happen for every baby. These are “mental growth spurts” – sudden and rapid changes in the brain. The leaps may be accompanied by physical progress, but these leaps are really about the brain.

Just before the developmental leap (the part you can see), the authors discovered that every baby went through a fussy period, characterized by clinginess, crankiness and crying. And these fussies happen to all babies within a week or two of 5, 8, 12, 19, 26, 37, 46 and 55 weeks. (There are several more, including 64 and 75 weeks).

Jackson, who is in a drooling phase, not a fussy phase right now!

Why do the fussies come?
The change in your baby’s brain alters the way she perceives the world. It’s pretty overwhelming and comes as a shock to your little one, (the authors liken it to going to sleep and waking up on a different planet) and this necessitates acquiring an additional set of skills for interacting in this new world.

But this different worldview brought on by the “mental grow spurt” allows your baby to learn the more advanced skills that belong to this new world, so really, it all works together.

Now, back to your cranky, fussy baby. It should help you know that “this too shall pass” (at least the crankies associated with this brain leap).

What can you do to help?
Stop and think. Is this teething? Is he getting sick? If not, then keep watching. Are there things she is doing (or trying to do), that she’s never done before? Are you near one of the noted fussy phases? Pay attention to your instincts. They are usually correct.

When one of these big brain changes occurs, the authors note that your baby will go through these steps:

A need to cling to mommy. Your baby is saying, “I am freaked out. Everything feels strange and different. I need the comfort and security of my mom.” And remember, since until 16-18 months a baby does not have a separate identity from mom, he really wants mom, not dad.
A need to play and learn new skills with mommy. “I’m eager to try some new stuff. Can you help me learn?”
A need to play on my own. “I’m ready to practice it by myself.”

What I really like about The Wonder Weeks is that for each phase, you’ll learn what new skills are associated with each week, the specific fussy signs (trouble sleeping, sudden shyness, loss of appetite, refusing to have diapers changed), how the leap may affect you, how your baby’s new skills emerge, and what you can do to help. (This will help with step #2 above.)

The idea of wonder weeks totally fascinates me. When my middle son Rob was in Occupational Therapy and Speech Therapy and Physical Therapy (yes, all at the same time), I noticed that whenever he was about to make a developmental leap, whether physical or language development, he’d start wetting the bed. And when he started learning to read, when he’d get to a particularly difficult part, he’s start squirming. The same thing held true just before he would suddenly acquire a whole new set of fine motor skills.

I asked his therapist what was going on. She said that his brain had to work so hard at acquiring the skill, that it didn’t have enough energy left over to control his body. Understanding what was going on inside of Rob helped me to be a lot more patient and less frustrated with him. Which helped me to be a better mom, and give Rob the space he needed to have his brain growth spurt.

-posted by Miss Analiisa, who wishes that she had owned a copy of The Wonder Weeks years ago.