Newborn Gifts That Keep On Giving

Newborn Gifts That Keep On Giving

People love to buy baby gifts. Clothes, toys, the newest gadgets – they are all favorites of the savvy shopper. But a newborn quickly outgrows many of the gifts he receives, sometimes in just a few weeks. Some gifts, however, can keep on giving. Books, music, and infant massage or baby yoga classes are three newborn gifts that continue giving long after baby grows up.

The Gift of Books

Books of all shapes, sizes, and topics make the perfect gift to encourage a lifelong love affair with the written word. The joy of reading is learned early. When you read to your child regularly, you nurture a love of books. There is no better time to begin, than when your baby is born. Story time with your newborn is more about speaking, sounds, and sharing a special bond than reading, but this positive early experience may help your child develop a thirst for knowledge and a healthy attitude toward learning.

The Gift of Music

From gentle lullabies to classical compositions, early exposure to music may become another gift of a lifetime. When you play great music for your baby, he learns the beauty of musical sound and develops parts of his brain that are involved in learning to talk. Variety is important here. The more types of music your child hears, the more he learns to enjoy. Vocal and instrumental selections expose your baby to different qualities of music, as does playing a variety of musical genres – classical to calm, jazz to uplift, rock and pop to excite and so on. Who knows, your baby may even grow up to be a famous singer, musician or dancer someday.

The Gift of Movement

Infant massage and baby yoga classes give the gifts of healthy touch and movement. The classes provide a superb bonding opportunity for you and your baby, but they may also do a lot more. What people experience as young children goes a long way toward establishing who they become as adults. Infant massage may help babies learn about their bodies and healthy physical feelings. It also facilitates a strong parent-child bond, which may improve your ability to maintain open communication with your child as he grows.

Likewise, baby yoga classes encourage healthy movement. When you learn to enjoy movement as a child, you carry that into adulthood. Your baby may learn healthier attitudes toward self-care, such as exercise and relaxation, as you model and share these experiences with him in class.

Whether you choose books, music, or infant massage and baby yoga classes, the best gifts for baby are gifts that provide a foundation for healthy growth and development. Not only are they fun to give, they give a little something back as you enjoy watching their benefits unfold in a child's life.

Gifts that Grow

One gift you may not have considered is giving the parents an important book that will explain how babies learn to talk. Knowing how babies learn to talk and how speech development grows a baby's brain is one of the most important things a parent needs to know.  A book that shows parents how to play  fun games that help babies to talk early is a great gift that will impact on a baby for the rest of his or her life. Give the gift How to Teach Baby to Talk

Teaching Babies to Talk - How We Talk to Babies Is Key

Recent Article on Babble.com confirms that how parents react to the noises and speech attempts a baby makes is key to baby speech progress.  When learning to talk babies need to learn what words mean and how mothers and fathers help them to do that is an important skill to learn.

The Science Of Talking To Your Baby 
A mom’s responsiveness to her baby’s talk and movements predicted the age at which the babies reached milestones like saying their first words, having 50 words in their vocabularies, putting two words together, and speaking in the past tense. Mom’s response predicted these milestones over and above the baby’s own vocalizations and gestures at those ages.

I followed this principle and other research findings closely when I wrote my ebook : " How to Teach Baby to Talk" and you can see the idea in use by a father here in this Youtube Video.
He begins trying to get the baby to copy him, then ends up copying the sounds the baby makes. But the important thing is they are having a conversation or interaction at the baby's level of development. The father is tuning in his baby talk to what makes the child happy and entertained.

My ebook " How to Teach Baby to Talk " gives tips and games to help with each stage of a baby's journey to learning to talk from birth to age three years.

Teaching babies to talk is getting popular

Reported in the New York Times that in Providence R.I. a " Talking to Babies" project is under way  thanks to a $5 million grand prize in Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Mayors Challenge. Bravely challenging the "no baby talk" myth, families will be encouraged by health professionals and social workers to talk to their babies in special ways.

"Another idea, however, is creeping into the policy debate: that the key to early learning is talking — specifically, a child’s exposure to language spoken by parents and caretakers from birth to age 3, the more the better. It turns out, evidence is showing, that the much-ridiculed stream of parent-to-child baby talk — Feel Teddy’s nose! It’s so soft! Cars make noise — look, there’s a yellow one! Baby feels hungry? Now Mommy is opening the refrigerator! — is very, very important. (So put those smartphones away!)"

The project is based on research by Todd and Risley which is also mentioned in my ebook "How to Teach Babies to Talk".

My downloadable ebook has been available since 2010 and the parents who have used it with children from birth to age three have expressed their delight in learning how to talk to their babies and report great progress in their child's responses. So  if you are not living in Providence you can still benefit from learning how to teach your baby to talk by reading my ebook.

Read the full article here

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/10/the-power-of-talking-to-your-baby/

Read about the ebook here
How to Teach Baby to Talk