Loving Babies Without Wearing Them

If bloggers got year-end bonuses, this would be mine. In this note, a new mother shares her discovery of infant expert Magda Gerber’s child care approach and the profound effects it has had on her family… Dear Janet, I stumbled on your blog through the guest post on “tummy time” when my daughter, now six months, was about two months old.  I was totally captivated by the video of Baby Liv and then spent...

How To Stop Entertaining Your Baby

Hi Janet, I love your articles. I love the concept of letting your little ones just be alone sometimes. I feel I am constantly trying to entertain my little 5 month old girl, and I want her to be someone that likes her own company in the future and can be creative by herself. I don’t know if my LO is clingy (maybe I’m misunderstanding something) or just used to me being right next to her 24/7? For the last 2...

Toddler Readiness – The Beauty Of Waiting

When my daughter was 2 ¾ she told me she wanted to ride a merry-go-round. I never figured out where she got the idea, but she loved books and must have seen a merry-go-round somewhere in one of them. We picked a day to visit the classic carousel on the Santa Monica Pier and talked about it for days ahead of time. We imagined the experience – choosing a horse, the music, fastening seatbelts, riding up and down,...

Protecting Our Baby When It’s Easier Not To (Guest Post by Miven Trageser)

From time to time I have the pleasure of sharing the perspectives of other parents, educators, and early childhood professionals familiar with the work of infant expert Magda Gerber.  This post is by Miven Trageser, M.A., a Marriage and Family Therapy Intern in private practice in Beverly Hills, CA.  Miven specializes in parenting, mother-infant attachment therapy, play therapy with small children, and couples...

Games My Kids Beg To Play

This is my kind of silliness. These family games are creative, simple, and spontaneous. They need almost no preparation and only minimal equipment, just household stuff. They are unplugged, screen-free, non-board games that un-bore children, and they are all about playing rather than producing something, or winning and losing. Best of all, they don’t cause mess-ups that disappoint everyone and make a parent...

Respecting My Baby (An End To The Daddy Doo Dah Dance) Guest Post by Michael Lansbury

I grew up in a New York City apartment with five siblings, four of them younger.  By ten years old, I was changing diapers, heating bottles, running baths and wiping spit-up from the walls and my hair. So, I have been intimate with the down-and-dirty of infant care for a long, long time. As a result, I am not intimidated by infants, nor am I impressed. The fact of babies is, of course, remarkable and pure grace. No...

“Baby Einstein” is No Genius

Finally! An insidious product, cleverly marketed for over a decade to parents at the expense of our children, is being outed. But will parents wise up? First, the good news: According to a recent article in the New York Times, “Disney Expands Refunds on ‘Baby Einstein’ DVDs,” The Walt Disney Company is widely refunding users of its ”Baby Einstein” videos in response to challenges about...

Blue Sky Thinking

“Take the mobile off the bed, take care of their needs, and leave them alone.” This odd sentence was my introduction to Magda Gerber and the child care philosophy that would become my passion. I had given birth a few months before reading this quotation, the only one by Gerber, in an article in L.A. Parent magazine about raising a creative child. I remember nothing else about the article, but I could not get...