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Showing posts with label parents. Show all posts
Showing posts with label parents. Show all posts

What Are The Benefits Of Cuddling And Co-Sleeping Of All Ages? Cuddling For Partners and Co-Sleeping For Parents and Children Or Parents and Infants

What Are The Benefits Of Cuddling And Co-Sleeping Of All Ages?
Cuddling For Partners and Co-Sleeping For Parents and Children
Or Parents and Infants

Let me begin by saying that communicating through touch is SO important it has its own field of science known as Haptics. ‘Haptics’ is a word that comes to us from Greek, meaning ‘I fasten onto’ or ‘I touch.’ In his book, “The Stages of Human Life,” J. Lionel Taylor tells us that “The greatest sense in our body is our sense of touch… we feel, we love and hate, are touchy and are touched, through the touch corpuscles of our skin.” And since our skin is the largest organ of our body there is lot of communication possible through touch.

The first portion of our brain to evolve on top of its reptilian heritage is the limbic system, the seat of emotion. It is this portion of the brain that permits mothers and their babies to bond and loving couples have it when they cuddle and co sleep. Loving touch triggers the release of oxytocin, often referred to as the "bonding hormone."

According to Tiffany Field, PhD, director of the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami, “Cuddling stimulates pressure receptors in the skin that create a host of effects, including reducing levels of the stress hormone cortical, lowering heart rate and blood pressure, and improving digestion.” And research says it works the same in adults. Touch has been found to increase self-disclose, rapport and comfort. When the well-known therapists Masters and Johnson were helping couples overcome problems they recommended time together just cuddling.

According to bio behavioral scientists at UCLA School of Medicine, touch is critical to a baby’s brain development. Developmental neuroscience research finds that the infant brain is designed to be molded by the environment it encounters. In other words, babies are born with a certain set of genetics, but they must be activated by early experience and interaction. In the critical first months of life, events are imprinted in the nervous system.  “Gentling” is the behavior that involves the stroking and touching of newborns of humans and other animals. 

“Hugs and kisses during these critical periods make those neurons grow and connect properly with other neurons,” says Dr. Arthur Janov, in his book, Biology of Love, “You can kiss that brain into maturity.”

Studies in bonding also show that human babies who are held often and touched frequently in their earliest stages of development have higher scores on physical, emotional, and interpersonal scales (Klaus & Kennell, 1976; Field et. al., 1986). Mothers and babies are hard-wired for the experience of togetherness through breastfeeding, co-sleeping, and baby carrying.


Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

Parents Using More Nonverbal Cues, Gestures and other Body language Can Improve Their Child's Vocabulary


Parents Using More Nonverbal Cues, Gestures and other Body language Can Improve Their Child's Vocabulary

Meaningful gestures and glances may help children learn more words, independent of how much parents talk to them

The more you gesture and use nonverbal signals to communicate with your child the bigger their vocabulary. I love to watch my niece and her husband play and communicate with their daughter AVA, They make funny faces and use gestures like a greatest mimes ever, but they do it while they speak to baby AVA.  They raise their arms in the air and bring them down as they sing the theme song to Sponge Bob Square Pants, acting out each line of the lyrics. According the to latest research that should improve their child ability to understand language and to increase her vocabulary.  Here is the research study I read recently in one of my favorite monthly magazines Scientific American Mind.
Oct 17, 2013 |By Janelle Weaver
Children with a large vocabulary experience more success at school and in the workplace. How much parents talk to their children plays a major role, but new research shows that it is not just the quantity but also the quality of parental input that matters. Helpful gestures and meaningful glances may allow kids to grasp concepts more easily than they otherwise would.

In a study published in June in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Erica Cartmill of the University of Chicago and her collaborators videotaped parents in their homes as they read books and played games with their 14- or 18-month-old children. The researchers created hundreds of 40-second muted video clips of these interactions. Another set of study participants watched the videos and used clues from the scenes to guess which nouns the parents were saying at various points in the sequences. The researchers used the accuracy of these guesses to rate how well a parent used nonverbal cues, such as gesturing toward and looking at objects, to clarify a word's meaning.

Cartmill and her team found that the quality of parents' nonverbal signaling predicted the size of their children's vocabulary three years later. Surprisingly, socioeconomic status did not play a role in the quality of the parents' nonverbal signaling. This result suggests that the well-known differences in children's vocabulary size across income levels are likely the result of how much parents talk to their children, which is known to differ by income, rather than how much nonverbal help they offer during those interactions.

This article was originally published with the title "Nonverbal Cues Could Boost Kids' Vocabulary."



Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

Body Language for Building Your Relationship with Your Preteen

Practical Ideas for Sustaining Your Relationship With Your Preteen - Before He or She is Out The Door"
1. Eat dinner with your family face to face at a table at least three times a week. There is enormous amounts of research that it effects many things from a child's ability to read body language and feel comfortable and adept at human interactions, to it reducing teen dropouts and drug abuse because children are checked in with and nurtured on a daily basis for more than the typical fifteen minutes.
2. Put your preteen in the back seat of the car and talk to her. With the front of her body protected and hidden she more likely to self disclose, sharing things she would normally not share in everyday conversation. If she is in the car with her friends listen to the conversation. They will share things, and oddly they will know you are listening and sometimes share more!
3. Always make it a point to go to your child and interact with them as they leave the house, return to the house. go to bed and rise the morning. The rituals or greeting, goodbyes, good night and good morning, especially when their is touch, bond your relationship and make your child feel more secure and connected to you. With that connection they are more likely to feel safe sharing their concerns and fears when and if they have them. You are also more likely to notice if they stop or try to avoid one of the rituals and will know quickly that something may be amiss. Don't let them talk you out of the ritual, with the, "I am too old for that." excuse. Tell them you need the ritual, because you do. Face it, a teenager can be get temperamental and mean, having rituals that help you love on her a few times a day reminds you that she still is your, "baby."
4. If you spend time face to face with your child you know what their “normal” body language is, how they sit, what their energy level is, what their voice sounds like, what their facial expressions and emotional reactions are like. Understanding and knowing the “baseline” of your preteen helps alerts quickly to behaviors that stray from the norm. For example your normally energetic talker now won’t make eye contact at the dinner table. Some changes occur with approaching adolescence but some changes signal depression, being ostracized by peers, problems with web bullies and drug use.
5. Notice when your child's does something RIGHT and praise her and reward her immediately so she doesn't have to do something bad to get your attention. For more insights in dealing with your preteen you may wish to purchase my book, Success Signals at www.PattiWood.net