One of the main tasks developmentally in the first few months of life is to learn to organize sensation. Sensory input having to do with touch and movement provides the infant with information about body position, equilibrium, safety, comfort, and connectedness.
Through gravity and movement sensations, your baby learns about balance, speed, directionality, as well as qualities such as whether a movement is smooth or jerky, abrupt or gradual, tense or flowing. Through touch receptors she learns to grasp and let go, to turn her head in response to stimulus, to experience where her body begins and ends, and to know if something feels safe or not. Through proprioceptors, your baby learns about body position, how one body part relates to another, and how to control the intensity of muscle activation.
The ways in which you hold, touch and move your baby provide her with a variety of sensory experiences that she uses as she learns to move independently. These experiences also influence her sense of self and her sense of safety.
Sensations help to organize movement: Movement both creates sensation and is informed by the sensations that it produces. Your baby’s nervous system is continuously taking in sensations. Different senses stimulate and motivate movement: for example, vision stimulates the development of head control, and hearing stimulates looking and reaching. As you watch your baby learning to move in response to what she is seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling (and how that movement then creates a whole new set of sensations), you can see how cognitive development grows out of this dance between sensation and motor activity.
Sensory input can increase or decrease arousal: Swaddling and rocking infants in their first few months of life provide proprioceptive (compression from the tightness of the wrapping) and vestibular input (swinging, rocking, swaying type motions) that helps their nervous systems to settle and quiet, inviting more inner focused attention. Tickling, bouncing and vigorous swinging all serve to jazz up your baby, increasing arousal and outward focused interactive play. Matching the kind of sensory stimulation you provide with your baby’s general state of consciousness helps your baby to feel fully met – experiencing that you are aware of just how much input her system is ready to handle in that given moment. This kind of attunement is the ground for healthy attachment.