Your Self-Motivated Baby

Book excerpt: A hands-on guide for communicating with babies in their first six months and nurturing their physical, social, and cognitive development, Your Self-Motivated Baby shows parents and other caregivers how to interact with very young infants and understand what they are expressing in their movements. Color photographs throughout the book show babies' motivation in play and how subtle interactions build bonding and encourage development. Following advice from author Beverly Stokes, a seasoned developmental movement educator, adults learn how to relate to babies and communicate effectively with them. Beverly Stokes makes it clear that preverbal babies are giving cues for caregiver participation very early on; it's up to us to try to understand them better. By communicating with babies sensitively in the first six months of their lives, we help them to establish the foundation for a healthy, confident, and joyful life. Beverly Stokes is a leader in developmental movement education whose book Amazing Babies Moving has been translated into five languages and is used together with its companion video series in university graduate and undergraduate programs in early childhood education, somatic psychology, and parenting programs internationally. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her partner, Dr. Louis Stokes.