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All You Need to Know About Bonding and Attachment with Your Baby

Written by Dr. Dovbakh Olga Dmitrivna on Mon, 27 November 2023

Key Highlights

  • Strong bonding is critical for early childhood development, involving physical touch, eye contact, soothing sounds, and gestures. Activities such as snuggling, playing, and spending quality time contribute to building a strong bond.
  • Bonding can start at the early stages of a baby's life, influenced by factors like care quality, the baby's temperament, and the surrounding environment.
  • Responding to a baby's needs with care, love, and warmth forms a strong relationship termed bonding and attachment.
  • Babies find responses like touch, smiles, and cuddles fascinating, creating a secure environment for exploration and play. 
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Bonding With Your Newborn

When you are a parent, the middle of the world shifts around your baby. You will notice every single detail about them as they grow. Their eye contact, mischievous smile, and chubby cheeks are so overwhelming. Your baby also enjoys your company. It is important to grow strong bonding with your baby as they grow up to have a stellar relationship for a lifetime.

You can start the process of bonding and attachment with your baby at quite early stages of their life. This process is influenced by many factors like quality of care and attention, the baby’s temperament and personality, and the surrounding environment. Furthermore, bonding with your baby is critical to early childhood development. It involves a range of activities like physical touch, eye contact, soothing sounds, and gestures.

Bonding With Your Newborn

Bonding between you and your baby develops with a strong attachment. Spending time with them will make you both joyful and happy. You will also feel quite protective towards your baby.

Your relationship with your baby is their first relationship where they feel good and secure. By paying attention to and caring for them, they will learn to trust you. It is said that when parents and babies have a good and strong bond while growing up tend to have good relationships with others as adults.

What Exactly Is Attachment And Bonding With Your Baby Mean?

When you respond to your baby’s needs with care, love, and warmth, it forms a strong relationship with them. This relationship is termed bonding and attachment. By doing this, they form a special and trusted union with you.

Why Bonding With Babies Is Important?

Bonding with your newborn promotes growth and development. Babies find your various responses like touch, smile, and cuddles fascinating. They feel safe in their surroundings and learn to play and explore. This environment creates a foundation for your child’s growth and development. Bonding with your baby also helps them grow physically and mentally. Their thought process, memory, and language also get improves.

How Will Your Baby Bond With You?

How Will Your Baby Bond With You?

1. Skin-To-Skin Contact

As soon as the baby is born, your doctors will encourage you to have skin-to-skin contact. It has several benefits such as bonding, comfort, encouraging breastfeeding, and giving warmth.

2. Eye Contact

Although babies’ vision is yet to be developed, they still can see. Gradually their vision develops, and their eyes will recognize and follow you. You can also expect a smile or two.

3. Talking And Chattering

When you hold your baby close and talk with them daily, they develop attention towards you. You can talk about anything with them or even read a book to them. Further, singing to your baby gives them a sense of language and rhythm. As time progress, your baby will learn to make sounds and gurgle. When you repeat your baby’s sounds to them, they will mimic them back to you. This way they will learn the art of listening and conversing.

4. Holding Your Baby

When you hold and cuddle your baby as much as possible, they feel loved, protected, and safe. Your baby needs lots of cuddling to feel loved. This provides a safe environment to grow and develop.

5. Playing With Your Baby

Playing games with your baby is a great way of spending time with your baby and bonding. You can play with your baby by cuddling them, dancing with them, stroking their hands, face, or feet, bending their knees, and showing them surrounding.

6. Tummy Time

Tummy time is a crucial activity for parents to engage with their baby to promote bonding and attachment. Tummy time refers to the period when a baby is placed on their stomach while they are awake and supervised. This activity is important because it helps to strengthen the baby’s neck and back muscles, promotes motor development, and encourages interaction and bonding between the parent and the baby.

7. Singing

Singing to a baby can create a close and intimate bond between the parent and the baby. The act of singing can be comforting and soothing for the baby, which can help to promote a sense of security and trust in their caregiver.

Conclusion

Although bonding is quite surreal, it is not always easy to establish. It takes a longer duration to establish attachment and bonding. Spending time with your baby, caring, cuddling, and watching the world from their perception can help to grow the bonding between you and your baby.

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Dr. Dovbakh Olga Dmitrivna

Dr. Dovbakh Olga Dmitrivna is a Clinical Psychologist based out of Ukraine. She graduated from the Bukovinian State Medical University, Ukraine back in 2009. Driven by a thirst of knowledge and with a keen interest in matters of the mind, Dr. Dovbakh Olga Dmitrivna went back to University in 2021 to specialise in psychiatry.

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