Emotional Nourishment for Your Baby
There’s no denying that eating well and having the right nutrients in pregnancy is important for you and your baby, but nourishment is not only about food.
It’s also about feeling emotionally nourished, and, believe it or not, this applies to your baby as well as to you. In the womb, long before birth, your baby is emotionally sensitive, and affected by your emotional well being.
Kitty Hagenbach and Yehudi Gordon from Babiesknow explain.
Babies have their own strong feelings and are aware of their mothers’ emotions, even before birth. They can experience bliss as well as anxiety, anger as well as a deep feeling of being bonded. And emotional feelings do really matter – they impact the development of your baby’s brain, nerves and immune system.
Recent breakthroughs in the science of the first 1500 days – the most crucial developmental phase of life, beginning from conception – reveal how important the environment in pregnancy is, in setting the scene for decades to come. A particular watch point is stress. When a mother feels stress, her anxiety hormones rise and her baby feels the impact: a baby’s first experience of life comes through the mother.
How much stress is too much? Each of us has different tolerance levels. It is not short term stress that creates the problem; the potential harm comes from ongoing, consistent stress. We strongly recommend that you take time out everyday during pregnancy to relax, calm your breathing put your feet up and connect to youR baby. Bonding begins in the womb, so get in the habit of chatting to your baby and build a secure and loving relationship right from the start. If you’re angry and tense, find a way to address the problem that’s vexing you, and get some support to help you let go.
Hand-in-hand with eating well, nourishing yourself emotionally is good for your baby’s health. Babiesknow, a parenting programme offering courses, groups and one-to-one & couples counselling, focuses on the emotional aspects of pregnancy and parenting.
Find out more at www.babiesknow.com/pregnancy/overview