Dancing With Your Baby: The Science of Nurturing Infant and Caregiver Through Music and Movement

By Sue Doherty

Now in a completely revised third edition Sue Doherty, anthropologist and author of the pioneering, practical book, Kinergetics: Dancing with Your Baby (1994), offers must-have cutting-edge research, advice, and insight. A groundbreaking look into the art and science of song, dance, and melodies--and their profoundly nurturing, therapeutic, and

• Language: English
• Publisher: Susan M. Doherty
• Release date: Oct 6, 2017
• ISBN: 9781087954332

Book preview

PRAISE FOR DANCING WITH YOUR BABY

"Every parent wants his or her child to feel connected, validated, and treasured. Dancing with Your Baby is a wonderful tool parents can use to develop deep connectedness. Since children internalize how their parents relate to them on a verbal and physical level, what better way to create this essential foundation than through dancing with them?"

Dr. Shefali Tsabary, Clinical Psychologist and author of the Oprah acclaimed The Conscious Parent and A Radical Awakening; and Out of Control and The Awakened Family

This book is a great blend of practical and creative methods, resting on a solid scientific foundation.

Rick Hanson, Ph.D. neuropsychologist, Senior Fellow of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, best-selling author of Hardwiring Happiness, Buddha’s Brain, Just One Thing, Mother Nurture, Resilient, and Neurodharma

Doherty uses language that is accessible, colorful, and rich with imagery. This book is a must read for any parent, caregiver, or soon-to-be parent interested in learning about the incredibly dynamic, rewarding, stimulating techniques for bonding with their baby that Doherty advocates.

Julia Dimitrova and Michael Hogan, Ph.D. senior lecturer and neuropsychologist at National University of Ireland, Galway

Integrating dance and musical activities into the parent-infant relationship is a wonderful way for everyone involved to feel socially connected, to be physically active, and to have fun. Sue Doherty carefully outlines safe, flexible, and age-appropriate ways to build dance into your baby’s life, while exploring how infant cognitive, social, and motor development shape these activities

Laura Cirelli, Ph.D. Psychologist, and Director of the TEMPO lab at University of Toronto, Scarborough, Canada

When we first started teaching classes there wasn't much information on the benefits of dancing with your baby (still isn't), but we did find Sue Doherty’s book and totally resonated with it. She is the leading pioneer in our field.

Amber and Meeshi Anjali, co-founders of GroovaRoo Dance™ (the babywearing dance group with eight viral videos)

"This book is an incredible resource for parents who long to be deeply connected to their children. Dancing with Your Baby offers so many practical ideas backed up by diligent research. Sue has such a passion for supporting deep attachment between parent and child."

Michelle Gale, Author of Mindful Parenting in a Messy World

Wow! A must read for caregivers everywhere! We, adults intuitively know, and science is proving, that music is powerful medicine, especially for babies. Partaking in music and dance is a rich form of self care. Sue’s beautiful book is full of convincing evidence and simple steps to inspire action that will fill your heart and change your life.

Suzi Lula, Best Selling Author, The Motherhood Evolution and Agape Licensed Spiritual Counselor

So many parents do what is necessary only, but do not take into consideration the baby's needs. Babies turn into adults and we want to nurture our children, so they become confident, caring and nurturing adults. Reading this book, Sue Doherty, does a brilliant job of explaining the importance of touch and deep love for a baby. I, highly, recommend this book for anyone who is about to have a baby, or has one now. We need to begin to dance with our babies!

Joyce Knudsen, Ph.D. founder and president of The Imagemaker, Inc. a Master Life-Coach, Impression Management Consultant and Company Branding Expert

This book is peppered with quotes and cutting edge research findings by psychologists and neuroscientists and vouch for Sue’s erudition and thorough ground work. It would make for a good gift. If you are expecting a baby or a parent of a newborn, go buy this book and start dancing with a light step and a song in your heart!

Sandeep Gautam is a psychology and neuroscience blogger at The Mouse Trap and at the Psychology Today blog The Fundamental Four. He also blogs at the Creativity Post, and his blog for The Times of India is called Mind Cafe

Dancing With Your Baby

The Science of Nurturing Infant and Caregiver through Music and Movement

Dedicated to my lovely babies of decades past—

Blake  and Carolyn

And sweet granddaughter Wren

And all forthcoming grandchildren

And to all the babes and caregivers the world over~

May you be safe, well, peaceful, and happy

Sue Doherty

Copyright Eightfold Path Publishing

By Sue Doherty 2021

Revised and updated 4th edition

Unabridged Audiobook Narrated by Sue Doherty

No part of this book may be reproduced transmitted in any form and by any means without the written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations used in book reviews and critical articles.

Cover art by Katie m. Berggren

Cover design by Brent Meske

Back cover photograph by Katherine Beth Photography

ISBN: 9781087954332

Published in the United States of America by Eightfold Path Publishing

To contact the author: [e-mail]

Note on the Use of Language

To avoid the exclusive use of male pronouns, I use he and she, his and hers," somewhat interchangeably.

Contents

PRAISE FOR DANCING WITH YOUR BABY

Dancing With Your Baby

Note on the Use of Language

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

1- Kinergetics—What’s it All About?

2- The Personal Connection—Touch

3- Be Your Baby’s Movement Therapist

4- The Sounds of Music

5- The Thinking Side of Babies

6- Special Needs: The Exceptional Child

7- The Anti-Stress Factor

8- The Latest Word in Sports Fitness

9 - The Necessary Know-how of Back Care

10- Now for the Exercises

11- Warm Up with Tai Chi

12- Dance Steps and Ways of Carrying Your Baby

13- Stretching it All Out

14- It All Adds Up

Appendix A

Appendix B

Appendix C

References

Acknowledgments

Author Bio

Foreword

Dr Shefali Tsabary

If there is one ingredient essential to healthy child development, it’s the connection between parent and child. Ultimately, it’s this bond between parent and child that shapes the child’s sense of self. The infant has no sense of who she or he is on an independent level. Instead, each child develops their sense of self from the reflection they see mirrored in their relationship with their parents or earliest caregivers.

From the manner in which caregivers touch, attune, and connect with an infant, they slowly blossom into a being with a growing sense of who they are. Paradoxically, the greater the interconnectivity between parent and infant, the greater the autonomy the child will enjoy later in life.

When the primal relationship between infant and parent flounders, it impedes the development of a solid experience of connectedness to another, which leaves the child flailing about for a sense of who she or he is and can become. When there is a lack of connectedness in the parental relationship with the child, a longing for connection becomes the driver of an eternal quest—an ongoing ‘searching’ that so often leads to shipwreck. However, when the primal attachment between parent and child is one in which the child feels valued, honored, and worthy in the eyes of his or her earliest caregivers, there develops a long-lasting sense of internal cohesion that leads to emotional stability, trust, and empowerment. In other words, the basic building block of a fulfilling and meaningful life is the infant-parent connection, which has the power to be either creative or destructive.

The earliest weeks, months, and even years of a child’s life are primarily nonverbal. Hence touch and physical contact take center stage during this crucial developmental period. The infant becomes aware of his or her physical presence in the world through the body’s senses, and physical stimulation through movement is a key aspect of the development of the child’s sensory and nervous systems.

Dance is one of our most natural forms of expression of the physical self, acting as a mirror of one’s soul. With the power to communicate without the need for words or sound, it is predominantly energetic—as is much of infancy. For this reason, dancing with one’s infant is a natural extension of the way in which the infant already communicates. When a parent learns to use dance with their infant, the parent discovers a language with which the two can readily communicate. As such, dance replaces words, thereby filling the void many parents experience in the absence of a verbal exchange with their child.

Watch a new mother, and you’ll see how she intuitively rocks her baby to a rhythm that’s organic and elemental, paving the path to an unspoken bond between herself and her child. Dance embodies the physical representation of joy, vibrancy, connectivity, and indeed life itself.

In Dancing with Your Baby, Sue Doherty artfully demonstrates the power of dance and music, revealing their ability to enhance an infant’s sense of wellbeing. Writing eloquently, she thoroughly documents the most current research in the fields of infant psychology and neurobiology, articulating the value of dance and rhythmical sound for creating a strong parent-child connection.

Every parent wants his or her child to feel connected, validated, and treasured. Dancing with Your Baby is a wonderful tool parents can use to develop deep, attuned connectedness. Since children internalize how their parents relate to them on a verbal and physical level, what better way to create this essential foundation than through dancing with them?

Dr. Shefali Tsabary, Clinical Psychologist aund Author of The Conscious Parent, Out of Control—Why Discipline Doesn’t Work and What Will, The Awakened Family, and Radical Awakening www.drshefali.com

Preface

This audiobook of Dancing with Your Baby updates the 2017 edition to include research published through September 2020. Every year scientific studies discover more and more about the ease at which babies learn. Here you’ll find the latest research on how music, movement, and various caregiving strategies affect a baby’s overall development, as well as the caregiver's well-being.

Is there a culture anywhere on our planet that doesn’t participate in music, dance, and song? Because movement to music is so universal, dancing with an infant is perhaps the most natural behavior in the human repertoire. Everywhere, babies are spoken to in rhythmical, high-pitched, infant-directed speech and cared for in environments filled with the stimulation of sound, movement, and touch. So much so that dancing with your baby may even be the only truly universal expression of play.

We instinctively rock a baby back and forth to music. If there’s no music available, we create it by humming or singing. Being held while dancing and simultaneously being exposed to music provides a rich environment for infants. As we keep time with the beat, we are unwittingly animating intuition, an intelligence all its own. We are responding to the human bond between music, memories, movement, and emotion.

Because dancing with a baby is so instinctive, compelling, and carefree, we likely aren’t aware of its importance. As an anthropologist, the human condition is my focus, seen from the broad view of the discipline’s four subfields: social-cultural, biological, linguistic, and archaeological. Something as broad in scope as the human condition, however, deserves insight from an array of disciplines, which is why this book is in part a review of neuroscience, psychology, and infant development-based research, together with kinesiology, interpersonal neurobiology, and music and movement therapy.

This book fits nicely into the framework of the newer fields of cultural neuroscience and positive psychology. Cultural neuroscience is the study of how values, practices, and beliefs shape and are shaped by the mind, brain, and genes over time. The brain responds continuously to everything we experience, altering its synaptic circuitry.

The use of neuroimaging technology to measure an aspect of brain function has led to a recognition of why nothing seems to move us quite like seeing a tiny baby’s face—even if it’s just a photograph of a baby. We now understand how a baby’s face excites regions of the brain essential to movement, speech, and being of service, preparing us to become empathetic caregivers. According to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, there’s concrete evidence for this natural impulse in both adult men and women. Observing the brains of adults who are unrelated to a child reveals activation of areas responsible for speech and movement; and also excites those brain circuits related to feelings of empathy, attachment, and reward, in preparation for interaction. This appears to be an embedded, hardwired impulse, since the triggering of such brain patterns is confined to images of infants and isn’t replicated in the case of images of adults or animals. Given this predisposition of the brain, it’s little wonder that picking up an infant and dancing feels so natural.

Some of the most pertinent and fascinating research has been conducted by Laura Cirelli and Laurel Trainor at McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind. Studies there found that 14-month-old babies, when bounced in sync with a movement partner, were far more likely to help their partner afterwards. A researcher holding the infant bounced in sync to music while a second researcher facing the baby bounced in or out of sync to the music. This second researcher later acted out hanging clothes on a line and dropping a clothespin. The babies that were bounced in sync with the researcher most often walked over to the clothespin, picked it up, and handed it to their adult partner. Babies who were bounced out of sync with the researcher actually walked away.

Further research at McMaster Institute showed that synchronous bouncing, with or without music, elicits prosocial behavior. However, the infants were more hesitant to help and far more likely to become fussy when music was absent. These findings suggest that music may assist in regulating mood and thus a baby’s ability to completely experience the outcomes associated with bouncing in sync with a partner. A previous study tested whether infant prosociality would extend to a person that did not participate in the movement, but were familiar acquaintances or friends of the synchronously moving partner—it did. If, however, the other individual was a stranger to the synchronous dancing partner—they were not helpful. The result demonstrates the potency of musical synchrony for social engagement and that babies may intuit third-party social connections when undertaking their own social relations.

As Professor of Psychology Frank Russo asserts in The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Brain (2019), although most individuals will justifiably focus on sound as the core of music processing, a more inclusive and nuanced consideration of music takes a multisensory perspective, involving the integration of inputs from auditory, visual, somatosensory, vestibular, and motor areas.

Babies know bad dancing when they see it. Between 8-12 months babies develop the ability to watch an audiovisual musical display and decipher whether the movement is in sync or not. This is an incredible display of integration between the cognition and sensorimotor systems. The crucial building block of this ability is already present in 2-day old newborns—they have proven sensitive to the beat in music. This is considered a spontaneously developing fundamental musical trait. What helps it develop further? Some answers come from observing how often a baby twitches in his or her sleep.

Twitching while sleeping is the body’s way of setting in place, tweaking, repairing, and maintaining sensorimotor circuits in the nervous system. As this system slowly matures, the mental processes of knowing and understanding through the senses and experiences and, eventually, thinking, also becomes more robust. There is an interrelationship and feedback loop: cognition facilitates moving and exploring, and that behavior generates sensory and cognitive information.

Fresh