To raise your baby to best advantage, you'll do well to stimulate your baby to become active by moving purposefully.  There are many ways to persuade even the youngest newborn to perform certain active movement even though he does not yet understand you and does not yet know how to imitate you.  But before describing these movements, let us review how active muscular motion works.

 Various stimuli act on sensory organs in our body (skin, eyes) and inside it (our inner sensory organs whiche enable us to feel hugry, tired) and create nervous processes which are communicated to the central nervous system (the  spinal cord or the brain) and from there transimitted to glands and muscles where they stimulate the excretory activities of the glands or motion of the muscles.

If these nervous processes are transmitted only to the spinal cord or to the lower parts of the brain, which is most common with infants, they react without being aware of the reaction - just as a sleeping adult.  Movements which your baby performs consciously and deliberately, which are not seen in a newborn but appear gradually, are caused by nervous processes communicated through the most complicated part of the brain - the cortex.  The difference between movement controlled by the cortical and subcortical centers is illustrated by the bowel movements.  When an infant soils his diapers in the first half year it is an act of pure reflex controlled by the spinal centers; but when during his second year he asks for his pot and performs the act after being seated on it, then it is controlled by the cortex.  So training a newborn consists partly in changing acts controlled by the spinal cord into acts controlled by the cortex.

In a word, no movements are unstimulated; every movement is a reaction to a stimulus. When you understand the stimuli that cause your baby to react, you'll discover many of the secrets of how to influence his behaviour. 

Can you communicate with a baby?

Insufficient knowledge of the psychological development of babies has been the main cause for the notion tha tit is impossible to communicate with a newborn and that upbringing can begin only after the baby acquires some ability to reason.

This is just plain wrong.  Research has show that a baby should be trained from his very first days of life and that he becomes more responsive the better he is reared during early infancy - and, of course, later too.

Because of their obsolete notions, parents did expose their babies to various stimuli but did not expect more in return than passive perception and an occasional smile.  Even the authors of many handbooks for parents have not known how to evoke an active reaction from a baby.  Proof of this are the various books on gymnastics for teh newborn.  Mostly they suggest so-called passive exercises such as taking a baby's arms or legs and moving them around.  The baby is being moved, but tolerates this movement only passively.  Passive exercises amuse healthy children (taking the baby's hands and clapping them), but apart from that their psysiological and physological value is very limited.  Badly performed passive exercises can even harm your baby! 

Your baby needs to feel safe, secure and to have his place in the world.  He feels safe and secure in conditions to which he is accustomed.  In a familiar environment your baby will react positively to new stimuli, but in lesser-known surrounding his reaction to the same stimulus will become negative; at home in his mother's arms he will happily greet an unknown dog, but outside near an unknown person he will be afraid of the same dog.  In surroundings where the baby feels safe and secure the infant will undertake small exploratory excursions. He will gradually acquaint himself with an increasingly wider environment but will venture only to places from which he can quickly return to his island of safety and security.  At first this island is a known corner, then the entire room, apartment, house, surroundings of the house, and so on.

Your baby has the need to create a firm bond with a small group  of people or at least one person. The baby needs to feel that he belongs to somebody and that the person belongs to him.  Usually he will include several people in this bond (mother, father, brother or sister, grandparents) who form a group which your baby can easily survey.  These people contribute most to his feeling of safety and security, and he can take a change of physical or social enviornment better in their presence.

Your baby forms a strong attachment ot the person who gratifies his basic vital needs, usually, of course, his mother.  The strongest attachment ties the baby to whoever gratifies his psychological needs - who plays with him, gives him interesting jobs, shows him the world.  The infant baby clearly realizes that he belongs to somebody who not only lives next to him, but also takes an active part in his activities and shares his joys and worries.

A baby needs to be successful in creative activities and social contacts.  For the baby to continue in his activities, his deeds must be rewarded.  One of the main rewarding stimuli for children's activities is success.  From successful activities with objects he not only learns; he also contros his ability to overcome difficulties.  All this rewards the baby's emerging self-confidence and self-assurance; failure and lack of interest undermine his self-confidence and create feelings of inferiority and deficiency.  If you give your baby the opportunity to be successful in creative activities and in dealing with people, you foster in him love of learning and give him the self-confidence in dealing with other people.

Your baby needs models.  By the end of his first year he will have learned to activiely incorporate himself in his social group through imitation.  Each person plays some role in society and baby needs to accept roles.  At first he identifies with those closest to him, whom he loves, respects, and most important of all, who do interesting things.  You'll be surprised at the activities your baby will imitate by the beginning of his second year.  Frequent imitation of activities of certain persons creates permanent habits and characteristics of the child.  It means that a baby needs good examples from his very first year of life.  

Activate your baby's hands as soon as possible, because hands are his most important tool for the active exploration of the world.  A baby must make "contact" with the world as soon as possible in the most literal sense: the infant must touch the objects and handle them. 

It is not enough for a baby to have suffieient random stimuli because overall development depends on the selection of stimuli that ensure versatility.  Sometimes, through ignorance or overanxiousness, we give a baby one-sided stimuli which ignore some facets of his development.  We may encourage only passive perception (the baby mostly just watches or listens to something), but we give him fewer stimuli-creating active reactions.  At other times we support the more general movements (crawling, walking, running, jumping) but pay less attention to the delicate hand movements.

A baby needs to exert an active influence on the world.  He has the tendency to be active, because only by activity - experimenting - can he get to know the world.  The physiological basis for this is his inborn orientation reflex, which gradually develops into orientation-investigatory behavior.  Lack of stimuli at an early age stifles this reflex (later it can be inhibited with a surplus of stimuli).

When awake, the baby should not be generally inactive, and his activities should not lack purpose.  The baby tends to be deliberately active and tries to create some interesting change with his activities.  These changes are the main motive for his activity and also the source of new experience because they not only excite him, but also draw his attention to the relationship between cause and result.  Try giving him opportunity to act on objects and people; cause reactions; discover the relationship between his own activity and the reactions it causes.  And useful activities are useful from the baby's point of view: because he learns to wave his hand at a certain object, the baby realizes that he creates a sound; if an adult did the same, he'd be wasting his time.

The infant baby needs to express himself freely and with minimum restrictions.  Even a little infant is more statisfied, happier, and more successful in an activity if he can decide on it independently and do it the way the baby wants.  The subject of authoritative versus nonauthoritative, directive versus nondirective rearing is much discussed.  The well-proved principle that extremes are not the best solution is valid here: constant orders as to what is and isn't allowed are undesirable, but so is permission for a baby to be governed only by his immeidate impulses.

The middle road is best: give a baby maixmum freedom within certain social rules.  A baby's freedom and lack of inhibition cannot come at the expense of inconvenience and damage to others.  The baby must be gradually led to disciplined freedom.  Give him the opportunity for interesting, useful activities and eliminate, so far as possible, opportunities for undesired activities.  Interfere with the baby's activity as little as possible.  When necessary, act as indirectly, discreetly, tactfully, and calmly as you can. 

Often parents restrict a baby's activities without realizing it.  They restrict the baby's movements with too much or too heavy clothing, or unnecessary confinement in small spaces - his crib, carriage or bed.  We often prevent him from performing some activities for fear that he will hurt himself or damage something.  Proceed reasonably and think whether the activiity is important to baby's development and important enough to warrant a certain amount of unpleasantness, danger, or damage.