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...

The Myth of Baby Boredom

Kiley holds up her head and peers around at the other infants. Her eyes stop and fixate on Chase, who is moving across the floor in an army crawl. Elbows bent and using alternating forearms, Chase propels himself forward towards a small, red whiffle ball that lay on the floor near Kiley. Although Kiley had also shown interest in the ball, her attention flagged when she realized that it was beyond her reach. Chase...

Set Me Free – Unrestricted Babies (And Equipment They Don’t Need)

Many months after becoming a mom I realized a shocking truth: we don’t need to buy every contraption on display at the baby super store! I had fallen into the trap of believing I needed all the technology that was available. I naively assumed that these products must be in stores because they were helpful and necessary, and no one had advised me to do otherwise. ‘Luckily,’ I found hand-me-downs from...