Consciously or unconsciously, you are performing many stimulation activities for your baby in day-to-day life. These activities help your child to learn and develop by stimulating their senses. A baby is new to almost everything – and as he develops reflexes such as sucking and rooting, he needs to develop his other senses as well. There are many stimulating activities for an infant.
Simple things like blowing raspberries and making your child laugh are also baby stimulation activities and help your child to learn new things, increase his attention span, memory, and curiosity level and affect him in a positive way. A child, introduced to an enriched environment where his senses of hearing, seeing, touching and tasting are constantly stimulated, has been found to be more active and intelligent than the one who is not. Baby or Infant stimulation activities can be numerous. It depends on your baby’s age to find which particular activities will help him learn things faster.
In This Article
- How Do You Stimulate An Infant?
- How Much Stimulation Do Babies Need?
- Stimulating Senses of a Newborn
- Stimulating Activities For Three to Seven Months Baby
- Some Stimulating Activities For Infants
- How Do You Tell If A Baby Is Under Stimulated?
- FAQs
How Do You Stimulate An Infant?
The term “infant stimulation” refers to the therapeutic practice of giving a baby with additional sensory stimulation in any or all of the sensory modalities (sight, sound, touch, balance, smell, and taste). Play is the best way for babies and young children to learn. Through play, children acquire exposure to and understanding of the world, language, social skills, motor development, and knowledge.
Important developmental activities for newborns may begin as early as the first week of life. Anything may stimulate the baby, from establishing eye contact to making funny expressions and sticking out your tongue to singing songs and tickling their toes.
How Much Stimulation Do Babies Need?
The quantity of stimulation that a newborn gets has a direct impact on the number of synapses created. Repetitive and regular stimulation strengthens and cements these connections. Those connections that aren’t utilized may be removed. Talk to your infant often, hug him or her, and create eye contact.
Read to your baby, repeat nursery rhymes, or sing songs to him or her. Repetition of the same song, rhyme, or narrative, is beneficial for newborns since it is one of the ways they learn. Baby needs less than an hour of stimulus distributed throughout the day.
Stimulating Senses Of A Newborn
A newborn is new to almost everything. Many of us have doubts about what can be done to stimulate our senses. As a parent, you also get to learn many new things with the baby’s arrival. In the first few months, your baby’s growth is rapid. Parents get very exhausted in feeding, cleaning, and hushing their baby to sleep. In the first few months, the baby’s eyesight also takes time to adjust. The baby cannot focus on things from the beginning itself.
To start stimulating his senses you have to begin with, hearing and touch. A baby is an expert in recognizing touch and sounds. He can identify his mother’s touch soon and sometimes if exposed to unfamiliar touch he reacts by crying.
You will soon learn that your child is able to identify your voice. He can make difference between the voices of different people. The activities you can do in this period are to hold, hug, touch your baby as much as you can, and talk to him. Use squeaky toys, play soft music, and play something on which you can dance. Hold your baby in your arms and sway your body, and do a little dance.
Keep yourself and your baby entertained. Using colors in the nursery, bright contrastive colors, patterns, and shapes make it easy to recognize him in different colors and shapes. Buy colorful soft toys for him and help him recognize colors. These activities will be very useful in developing, your baby’s senses and bonding with him.
Stimulating Activities For Three to Seven Months Baby
Your baby would have started to enjoy social play and would be moving already. His tummy time would already be working wonders for him. Motor skills development will take place, and soon twisting and crawling will encourage mobility by strengthening the core muscles. Some would be attempting to balance themselves, and would also babble – so be careful what you say.
After your child is 12 months old, you can include many activities to enhance his senses and help his nervous system strengthen. These activities are helpful in getting your child’s attention and keeping him engaged in something or other. The more your child gets to learn new things now, the more intelligent, he will turn out to be later.
Some Stimulating Activities For Infants
You can do a number of activities to stimulate your infant, some are as follows.
1. The Good Kiss, The Bad Kiss
Get your child to sleep on his back. Lift his one leg to plant a kiss on the sole of his feet. Make a face that this kiss was yummy. Kiss his other feet and tell him this kiss was yucky. Make faces to tell how yummy or yucky the kiss was and observe your Childs reaction. He will normally laugh when you kiss his feet, which taste yucky. However, this is a good way to make him understand the difference between the two.
2. Peek-A-Boo
This activity does not require any explanation you simply have to hide your face or any object and pop it back into view. By doing this your child will be able to understand objects and recognize them.
3. Copy Cat
Make a face like sticking out your tongue or make simple sounds, vowels mainly. Do it repeatedly soon your baby will learn to copy you. Child young as two weeks can also imitate. By doing this you help him learn new things this is a sign of very early problem-solving behavior.
4. Chit Chat With Baby
Keep talking with your baby about anything. Talk in a high-pitched baby voice and be reactive. Make sure you display emotions in your talk. Just blab anything your baby will catch it. You may also see that even if your baby cannot pronounce words he will blab away anything. This is surely a wonderful moment, but by doing this your baby will understand how to display his emotions if he does not like something he will blab in a high-pitched voice. This is a good way to help him communicate.
There are many other things too that you can do to help your child learn, memorize, replicate, imitate, and develop. Singing, dancing, tickling, making faces, taking him out, surprising him, making him laugh, and making sure that you get to spend a lot of time with your baby. Your child learns a lot just by imitating you so be active yourself.
How Do You Tell If A Baby Is Under Stimulated?
A lack of stimulation to the child’s senses may lead to irritability, withdrawal, rocking, clothes chewing, and a lack of energy and drive. Is it taking more than twenty minutes for the infant to go to sleep? Can they sleep for more than an hour at a time? If this is not the case, they may be suffering from under stimulation. An under-stimulated infant may also seem disinterested or sleepy while awake.
FAQs
1. How Do Overstimulated Babies Act?
To put it simply, babies and infants may get overstimulated when exposed to excessive amounts of noise or activity. Children and infants who are overstimulated may cry or become irritable. There is a possibility that toddlers may have tantrums.
2. Is TV Too Much Stimulation For Babies?
Yes. A baby’s brain may not be able to handle the stimulation of a TV, phone, or other electronic devices until after they reach the age of 18 months. That’s why the AAP ( American Academy of Pediatrics) advises keeping kids away from screens until after they are 2, and even then only letting them watch an hour of instructional content every day until they become 5.
