The emotional health of a newborn depends on the quality of maternal-infant responsivity beginning at birth. Responsive, sensitive parenting (RSP) is an evidence-based practice model to provide an infant with essential maternal and paternal nurturance, safety, emotionality, security, touch, soothing, stimulation, and basic care.
Why Responsive Sensitive Parenting is Beneficial:
Newborns are prewired to experience the feeling of emotion. It is the invisible drive that anchors, guides, and warmly welcomes the infant into the world. Infants possess an innate need to experience feelings and emotions at birth. If the child’s persistent emotional need is not satiated, feelings of deprivation occur.
RSP refers to family interactions in which parents are aware of their child’s emotional and physical needs and respond appropriately and consistently. Sensitive parents are ‘in tune’ with their children. RSP immediately facilitates the essential maternal attachment bond with her newborn.
How to Implement Responsive Sensitive Parenting:
There are four core elements of RSP: Turning, addressing, listening, and responding.
- Turning: Reorienting your focus from yourself to your child.
- Addressing: Willingly and unconditionally accepting your child as a unique person who is capable and permitted to voice their own ideas.
- Listening: Being empathic and understanding your child’s own frame of reference—how he or she sees the world.
- Responding: Responding in an honest, kind, and sensitive manner.
Maintaining an attuned mindset requires that we practice “mind-mindedness,” which can look like any of the following:
- Treating your newborn and infant not merely as an entity to be satisfied, but as someone who has a mind of their own.
- Tuning in to what your infant or child might be thinking or feeling.
- Learning to know your child’s cues and unique features.
- Being sensitive to and aware of your child’s cues and striving to accurately interpret them.
- Responding promptly and appropriately to your child’s cues.
- Being selectively and sensitively attuned to your child’s internal states and unique thoughts, feelings, and frame of reference.
The maternal attachment bond must be established at birth. There’s no time to waste in forming this vital connection to ensure a foundation for healthy emotional, social, and cognitive development.
By implementing RSP interactions you will be aware of your child’s emotional and physical needs, be able to respond appropriately and consistently, and feel ‘in tune’ with your child.
