What To Do With Baby

How do I best support my baby’s learning?

The Learn With Less podcast is a family enrichment program for parents, caregivers, and infants and toddlers of all developmental levels. In this podcast series, we get together to sing a few songs, discuss some ideas for play, outline some insight about early development, and talk about life as a parent or caregiver in these early years of parenthood. As many of you know, I released my first book in May 2018, Understanding Your Baby: A Week-By-Week Development and Activity Guide For Playing With Your Baby From Birth to 12 Months. And today, what I’d like to do is to just give you a little bit of insight about how I became the person to write this book.

I am a speech-language pathologist. For the entirety of my career, I’ve been working with early communicators. Much of my focus has been in early intervention, which is birth to three years. When I became a mom, it really dawned on me how much more work I had to do as far as the parent education piece. So, I want to just give you a little bit of a background and give you the rationale behind what I do with Learn With Less, and what I do with families with infants. So here goes!

We All Start The Same

Regardless of who you are, where you come from, what language or languages you speak, you and I (and anyone who considers themselves a parent or caregiver) are each ultimately responsible for raising humans. When we understand more about how humans all over the world develop and learn, we feel more empowered to parent.

Regardless of whether you’re a first time or a “seasoned” parent or caregiver, when you have an infant, you are in the thick of it. Becoming a parent (or any type of caregiver – I’ll use these words interchangeably throughout) to a new person is an enormous undertaking. Regardless of how much (or how little) we think we know about babies, there is so much to learn. I want you to remember that we all feel vulnerable, and we all want the best for the children in our care.

At Learn With Less, we do not aim to cover the divisive topics on which we tend to stand vehemently behind opposing lines. This is about our babies. This is about you. I want to provide gentle support to help you understand and connect with your baby, so you can move together through the first year of caregiving. We mix the developmental research (the science) with the creative ways to support the developmental stages your baby moves through (the art). We are going to get to the heart of what it is to be a caregiver of infants.

Infants (and toddlers) learn through observation, imitation, and interaction. When we learn more about what “play” looks like using very simple materials, we feel some peace of mind that we all crave as parents. Peace of mind is what we all want: we want to know that we are doing all we can to raise decent human beings.

That’s what I aim to provide at Learn With Less. That’s the kind of community that I’m fostering, and that’s what I’d like to begin to offer you with this book. It’s all about finding the joy in the mayhem. Parenting infants and toddlers is crazy – I’m not going to tell you I can take that away… I can’t! What I can do is to help you find the joy in the connection, and start to build the foundation for a lifetime of learning.

My Journey Into Parenthood

I was 10 weeks pregnant with my first baby when my husband and I moved across the world. Surrounded by new people, customs, systems,