Tips on Caring Your Baby’s Skin

Baby’s skin is very soft and smooth. But, it is still vulnerable to many substances. Therefore, parents should always pay much attention in caring their baby’s skin. There are tips that parents can do in order to prevent seasonal skin conditions.

Those tips are:

• Apply generous amounts of moisturizing creams and ointments to areas of your baby’s skin that appear dry.
• Use a humidifier to boost moisture and ease your child’s breathing overnight.
• Use only fragrance-free baby soaps and lotions.
• Reduce the number of baths — avoid daily baths and let your baby spend no more than 10 minutes in lukewarm water.
• Don’t bundle children up too tightly. Heavy layers can make children sweat, leading to skin irritation, while under-dressing can expose your child’s skin to the elements.

I believe with proper handling, there will be no problem related to your baby’s skin. Hopefully, these tips can help you in caring baby’s skin.

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Crib and Bedroom Safety Tips

Here are some safety tips to help make your baby’s bedroom and crib a safer place for her. It is important to note that this is not a complete list of baby hazards, but rather a guide to help you better understand how to better identify these hazards.

• Locate the crib away from windows where broken glass and blind cords can pose serious threats to your baby.



• Keep cribs away from any accessible electrical outlets.



• The crib rail should require at least two movements to move it down. This helps prevent small children from opening the rail by themselves.



• Prevent suffocation or entanglement. Never use a crib sheet unless it fits securely on crib mattress. Make sure the crib sheet overlaps the mattress so it cannot be dislodged by pulling on the corner of the sheet.



• Never use an adult sheet on a crib mattress; it can come loose and present an entanglement hazard to baby.


• Remove pillows, quilts, comforters, and sheepskins from the crib.



• Place a baby on his/her back on a firm, tight-fitting mattress in a crib meeting current safety standards.



• Keep pictures and other wall hangings away from cribs so they cannot accidentally fall into the crib, then hurt your baby.



• Hanging toys in the crib can cause children’s clothes to become tangled.



• Remove mobiles when your baby is 5-7 months old or sooner, if necessary.



• Keep bedroom doors closed while baby is sleeping.



• Use a monitor to listen for children if they sleep in another room.

Hopefully these tips could help you to provide safe bedroom and cri for your beloved one.
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Crying Baby: Don’t Panic

Being a parent provide unique experience that can trigger a pleasant feeling when we deal with our baby. But sometimes it can also be the hardest thing to deal with. One of the first challenges parents face is how to deal with a crying baby. Crying is a normal and a natural part of a baby’s development. In fact, it's one of the first things that doctors and nurses look for as a sign that a newborn is healthy and alert. Crying is a necessary and useful behavior for all babies. The main purpose of a baby's crying, believe it or not, is to talk to you since crying is the only way babies have to communicate that they need or feel something. According to John Bowlby and Margaret Ainsworth, crying is primarily an appeal for the protective presence of a parent. There are many meaning of crying, but one thing that we should realize that crying helps to establish and maintain the attachment tie between babies and their parents.

Crying behavior in baby is activated primarily by separation and is terminated primarily by physical contact, unlike other attachment behaviors of babies, such as smiling and arms up, which are activated by social contact. The many replays of crying and the comforting parental responses it brings—disconnection followed by connection—help to create, maintain, and affirm the tie between the baby and the parent. Usually, crying baby will trigger the parents to right away handle the crying by trying to meet baby’s needs.

I have to inform to you that when your baby starts crying you have to immediately respond it. Many parents are afraid that responding immediately to their baby’s cry will spoil the baby. This belief is a common mistake--and a big one! You are not going to spoil your baby by giving them attention. In fact, if you answer calls for help, your baby will probably cry less overall. Sometimes the longer a baby cries, the more upset he or she becomes, and the more difficult it becomes to calm the baby. Crying too long will also make the baby getting into the stressful condition, and it will change their nervous system due to their brain is flooded by stressing hormones.

When your baby cries, first of all you have to assess the situation and meet the most pressing need. For example, you can change the diaper, feed, burp, or change position of baby. Once the basic needs are covered, there are many ways to help calm your baby, most having to do with providing reassuring contact and a pleasant environment. Sometimes there's nothing more reassuring and nurturing than skin-to-skin contact (tactile stimulation) and a relaxed environment. Following are the ways to soothe a crying baby:

1. Pick up your baby. Hold him or her to your heart. The sound of your heartbeat is familiar and calming. A baby most often needs the comfort of being held. Babies who are held and cuddled cry less.


2. Rhytmic pat. Pat your baby’s back or bottom. A heartbeat pattern or any other rhythmical pattern may be soothing.


3. Breathe slowly and calmly. The baby may feel your calmness and become quiet.


4. Gently and quietly, move your baby to a new position.


5. Gentle stroke. Gently and repetitively stroke one of your baby’s body parts. Experiment with stroking directly against the skin and with stroking clothing on an arm, a leg, the neck, behind the ears, the bottoms of feet, or the back.


6. Dim the lights, or turn the TV down or off.


7. Rhythmic motion. Rocking your baby or walking him or her in a stroller may soothe him or her.


8. Neck cradle. Cradle your baby’s face between your cheek and shoulder. Sway or rock your baby while you hold him or her this way.


9. Turn on some soft music, slow dance and/or sing. Sometimes soft background noise (white noise) helps. Some babies are comforted by external monotonous noises such as vacuum cleaners, washing machines, dishwashers, or the sound of running water. If your baby is soothed by these types of white noise, try making a tape of the sound to cut down on your power bill.


10. Monotone hum. Hum a monotone note over and over again. You might even find your baby humming it with you.


11. Skin contact. Remove your baby’s shirt and lay her or him against your bare skin inside a robe or under a blanket, or even you can massage your baby’s body gently.


12. Lying together. Lie down with your baby on the couch, bed, or floor. Try positioning yourself and your baby both belly-to-belly and “spoon” style with baby’s back to your belly. You can play with him or her.


13. Wrap your baby snugly in a blanket, or you can wrap your baby swaddle-style in a blanket. Experiment with having your baby’s arms inside and outside the blanket.


14. Take a warm bath together as the warm water may calm your baby.


15. Distraction. Distract your baby with interesting sights, such as your face, other people, pictures, fish swimming in a tank, toys, a flashlight shining on a wall, a mobile, or even a “snowy” television, just keep trying to refocuses your baby’s attention.


16. Trying to talk or read quietly to your baby.


17. Lay your baby tummy down across your lap and rub his or her back, or sway your knees from side to side.


18. Feeding small amounts more often may help.


19. If your baby cries at bath time and is startled by water, wrap him or her in a diaper or soft blanket before getting him or her wet. Remove the cover when the baby feels comfortable.


20. Taking a break is okay. If you feel yourself getting very stress, you can wrap your baby in a soft blanket, turn out the lights, place your baby on his or her back, close the door, and leave the room. Give yourself some time to calm down. Remember, it is never okay to shake or hit a baby.


21. You can ask for help from your family and friends you trust to care for your baby.

Dealing with a crying baby is one of the great challenges facing you as a parent. However, it's important to recognize that a baby's cries have special meaning to you. Raising a child is a brand new experience filled with expectations and anxiety. Remember that babies were given the ability to cry for a reason. Their moans, shrieks and howls are their first attempts to talk to you. You have to stay calm in the face of their crying and remind yourself that crying is just a part of the healthy development of your child.

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Raising Caring And Peaceable Children

Peaceful in our world is an ideal condition in which world’s citizen can bring their life to more meaningful. The term of peace is also being a target for parents in raising their child. Caring and peaceable children are essential to build a global community for peace. People from all cultures are recognizing that “peace and caring” are essential to our survival as a human species.

A common goal for parents in raising caring and peaceable children is to promote the environmental and relationship fabric that foster and sustain caring and peaceable children. According to Swick (Kevin James Swick, an Instructor and Teacher Education from University of South Carolina, Columbia), there are six elements that are important to the shaping and continuing renewal of this goal.

1. Valuing each person’s integrity. It is the basis for having a caring society. The priority goal must be to help children see themselves and others as special, and for its purpose children need adults to act with integrity. Children should be helped by adult to help them see human differences as sources of enrichment and empowerment. In this regard, Caldwell (1989) noted that the environment which was created by parents for children are the clearest signal of parent’s beliefs. Thus parent can begin by providing children with safe, secure, decent, loving, and just communities.


2. Reaching out to each other in caring ways. It is also important to use in helping children and adults develop and refine their schema for caring and peace. A decent and caring society requires a sense of community that can best happen through open and sensitive relationships.


3. Respecting and valuing human differences. It supports children’s development of healthy relationship with others. Children who are isolated from each other will miss opportunities to learn how to live in peaceable ways. Therefore, we need to engage children and ourselves in learning about people’s different cultures. One way to support this effort is to make children involve with people of various cultures in positive and sharing ways. I believe that young children are especially motivated to help each other, thus we need to capitalize on this interest with many learning experiences where they can make interaction with children of diverse cultures.


4. Serve others in meaningful ways. Doing service for and with others strengthens everyone involved. Truly great societies are marked by their ability to reach out to each other through mutually enriching service. Interestingly, in infancy and toddlerhood Swick noted how very young children willing to help each other. This is especially observed by Brazelton and Greenspan in care settings where infants and toddlers have role models who are caring. Unfortunately, this early desire to serve is often left unattended. Therefore, we need to plan regular service activities so children and adults develop the spiritual core of caring and peaceable living. If every citizen contributed one hour of monthly television time into meaningful service there would be a dramatic move toward peace and caring.


5. Build charitable habits. Building charitable habits into our daily lives is absolutely essential to create a lasting system that nurtures children and adults. Creating places where the universal values of decency and caring are happening in the lives of everyone is a necessity. Sapon-Shevin says the power of each teacher is seen in the impact they have on children’s lives. She says that it is unreasonable to expect students to be loving and supportive of each other if teacher puts down individual students or uses labeling or name calling.


6. Develop a belief in the goodness of people. A faith in each other is what provides the basis for having a community of learning, trusting and growing people. In this particular case, adults can take the lead by engaging in acts of kindness. We must build communities where goodness is the mark of social and spiritual life most valued by all people.

It is clear that we must have peaceable, decent, and caring children. It must be our priority goal in early childhood education and in every community group. Let us never forget that early childhood presents once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to prepare young children’s brains for a lifetime of either harmony and peace or struggle and conflict. Let us seize these opportunities to enhance young children’s chances for joyful lives and provide the children in our care the kinds of homes and communities that will help them actualize their potential to the fullest (Swick & Freeman, 2004).

Best Regards

Reference: Kevin James Swick (2006), Families and Educators Together: Raising Caring and Peaceable Children. Early Childhood Education Journal, Vol.33, No.4.


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Sleep Better With Your Baby

David Olson, MD (the child physician from Michigan) said that the most of baby’s sleeping problem were always related to “how” and “where” they recorded their latest memory before they sleep. Whereas, still Olson said, most of parents trying to make their baby sleep by breastfeeding him/her or by giving him/her formula milk, then parents slowly remove the baby to their bed, and further they carefully step away from the baby’s bed. Those things will make the baby confuse when they awake in the midnight, they wonder why they laid on the different place. Therefore, they will need their parents to be present in order to make they sleep again, cause baby feel safe when they know their parents are around.

Olson also said that 4-5-month-baby, generally, have been able to sleep tight at night. In order to make those things happened, parents should have had a plan. So, let’s arrange the plan to make our beloved baby sleep tight at night. At least, there are 4 plans that we should conduct to make our baby sleep well at night:

1. Conducting joyful ritual routinely when the sleeping time has arrived. The objective of the ritual is to calm down the baby and make them comfortable. You can conduct any ritual to them. For an instance, first of all you can wipe your baby with warming-waters, second of all you can massage them, then the third changing their clothes, and fourth you can sing a song for them or praying and kissing them before you closed the ritual. The principal is you should conduct the same ritual with the same order at the same time and the same place with non-noisy atmosphere. You have to remember that for the first of month you have to consistently conduct the ritual. It will make they learn about their sleeping time and they will get used to it.


2. You have to commit that once your baby is put on the crib, it’s forbid to remove them anymore from it. If you find that your baby doesn’t want to sleep after ritual, don’t worry, you just ignore them. Make the baby bored with you, slow but sure, the bored-baby will fall asleep.


3. Sometimes baby can feel fear about something that may be experienced by the in the day-time. If this is happened and make them awake in the night, you have to receive it and trying to calm them down instead of angry to them. In the tomorrow, you have to look for the things that make them feel fear, solve it and then add the new joyful thing on the ritual at the night. Those jyful activity could erase their fear memory.


4. You have to notice that your baby should spend less than 3 hours when they are taking a nap in the noon. The more time they needed to take a nap, the more difficult for them to sleep well at night. The main objective of sleeping at night is to give your baby an adequate time to do the normal activity in the day-time.

I myself had applied the 4 points above to my baby, and it works perfectly, now the fighting sleep at night is not my concern anymore. Ok, good luck moms and dads, and happy sleep tight with your beloved baby.

PS: Massaging your baby will improve significantly their sleeping quality.

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