Our Preparing for Caring Project

Teaching touch and handling skills to parents (and other caregivers) has become a main focus of our work, and a way of putting our values and principles into practice. We’ve put a lot of consideration into clarifying and articulating these principles, and as of early 2020, we’ve developed an illustrated handout with practical suggestions that come out of our philosophy.

We send these documents to parents and caregivers in advance of their first session as a way of saying “here’s where we’re coming from.” It’s part of our mission to spread the ideas and practices more broadly, and to make them available to anyone who is interested. To this end, we spent the month of May 2020 on an awareness campaign that included a series of short articles and online events to unpack the information, answer questions, and gather feedback. You can find links to these resources below. The documents are available in English, Spanish, Finnish, French, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Slovak – with additional languages in the works.

We believe practices that help us care for ourselves and each other should be shared freely and spread widely – always and especially in this moment. This is our contribution.

Interested in receiving support around learning and practicing these ideas? Email us to schedule a private session, online or in person, with or without a baby.

We invite you to read more and download the documents – the links are below.

Let us know what you think – leave a comment on this page or send us an email.

RESOURCES

Follow the links below for a series of companion articles and recorded zoom sessions (from May 2020) where we expand on and discuss the ideas in our handout.

Guiding Principles: Safety, Orientation, Comfort, Bonding and Curiosity

Baby Ball: A Responsive Container

Four Surfaces: We Are Their Environment

Picking Up, Putting Down, and What to Avoid: Moving Transitions

THE DOCUMENTS

CREDITS
Text: Sarah Barnaby & Amy Matthews
Illustrations: Joanna Cotler
Spanish translation: Maruma Rodríguez
Finnish translation: Satu Palokangas
French translation: Sandie Chanchah do Vale
Italian translation: Gloria Desideri
Brazilian Portuguese translation: Diego Pizarro
Slovak translation: Oľga Silvášiová

We respect your privacy and will never sell, rent, lease or give away your information (name, email, etc.) to any third party. Unless you opt in to our email list, we will send you email only to let you know of updates to these documents.

ALL THE DETAILS

Why handling matters

• How a baby is handled affects all aspects of their development: their patterns of perception, their problem-solving abilities, their emotional well-being, their cognitive functioning, and their sense of agency in the world.
• The tasks of caring for a baby are numerous and repetitive. While they might be routine and task-oriented for the caregiver, they are potentially big experiences for a baby.
• Because they are repetitive, even small changes in a caregiver’s habits and choices can add up to a significant difference in how a baby’s development is supported (or impeded).
• Handling tasks are opportunities for relationship, engagement, participation and co-regulation between the caregiver and baby. They are moments that can help build secure attachment and a felt sense of a safe home base.

Teaching handling skills

• In teaching handling skills to parents who bring their babies to developmental movement sessions, we’ve frequently heard responses such as “I wish I had known this sooner,” “That makes so much sense” and “Nobody ever taught me this!” There is clearly a gap and we want to help fill it.
• Our training and our way in to working with people is movement-based. Handling skills are movement skills, and they are learnable and teachable.
• We developed our Preparing for Caring workshop in 2017 as a way to offer our principles and handling suggestions to people (often before they have a baby), giving them a chance to learn about and intentionally develop their handling skills and habits.
• In January 2020, we offered the workshop to several parenting groups at a community center in East Harlem. In preparation for this outreach effort, we developed an illustrated handout for the participants — something we’ve wanted to do for a long time.  

About our illustrated handout

• The illustrated handout was developed to go along with our Preparing for Caring workshop, and in conjunction with our outreach to an Early Head Start community in NYC. Now we’re using it as a way to start spreading the ideas and suggestions more widely, making them freely available to anyone who’s interested.
• We’ve published the principles and handout documents with a Creative Commons copyright that allows sharing and adapting the work for non-commercial use with credit. Our intention is to encourage collaboration and reuse, while preserving the source credits and lineage of the work.
• Our principles and the handout are being translated into several other languages with the support of Infant Developmental Movement Educators and BMC teachers around the world. The principles and handout are currently available in English, Spanish, Finnish, French, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Slovak.

Preparing for Caring by Babies Project is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at https://babiesproject.org/preparing-for-caring/.

Please contact us at babies@babiesproject.org with your inquiries, comments and questions.