Expanded
Thoughts
Developmental Movement Education for Infants and Caregivers Begins with Readiness
As an adult — which is the English word for being one’s own primary caregiver — how do I know when I am ready? Ready to rest, ready to learn something new, ready to connect with myself, ready to connect with others, ready to eat, ready to sleep, ready to take on a new project? I believe that my capacity to sense and assess my readiness is deeply intertwined with my capacity to sense, notice, and make use of the tools I’ve acquired to respond to my needs as they arise. If another person wants to know about my level of readiness for something, they can ask me, because I also possess the skills to respond verbally with this information by saying, for example: yes, I’m hungry and would like a sandwich.
Assessing the readiness of an infant is different in part because they do not yet possess the verbal skills with which to communicate their needs. It’s also different because they’ve not yet acquired enough experience and skill to move through the world meeting their own needs. Because babies can’t tell us when they are ready, nor do they have enough experience to necessarily know what would feel most supportive to them, it is up to their caregivers to make choices for the baby, to choose what they think will be the most nourishing, most supportive, most helpful for the baby. In other words, to decide what the baby is ready for and what is beyond them.
Infant Developmental Movement Education is about offering caregivers information about how the touch and handling choices they make for their baby can meet the infant in a place where they have agency to make choices at every step along their way, from birth to walking. The role of an Infant Developmental Movement Educator, or IDME, is to identify what an infant has the capacity to do and what they have not yet acquired the skills to support. This place of agency, where choice making is possible, is what I define as the place of readiness.
Arriving in this place of readiness is about creating an environment that sets the baby up for what’s coming next in their movement development but, generally, is not about doing it for them. Arriving in this place of readiness is about supporting the baby to follow their curiosity about themselves, the world, and their experience of it as much as possible, which means noticing and respecting the places where they baby has agency over their experience and offering support in the places where the baby has not yet learned to make choices for themself.
Infant Developmental Movement Educators have specialized knowledge and skills around how the building blocks of movement overlap and layer together into a movement repertoire that eventually manifests as the ability to walk. This specialization is about assessing a baby’s readiness as they progress through each step of their developmental movement journey and offering ways to set them up for whatever their next step is.
IDMEs and The Family Ecosystem
Families are complex webs of responsiveness in which the family members, of any age, are continually adapting to one another’s presence and behaviors. As an Infant Developmental Movement Educator, my job is to witness and hold space for the ecosystem of a family, while also bringing knowledge and understanding of the creative process that is learning to move. I am there to value process over milestones and offer insights into ways that caregivers can support their infant’s creative process. I am there to offer and advocate for ways to touch, handle, and be with babies that allow abundant space for them to learn settling skills, self-regulation, and explore a full range of ways to physically inhabit themselves, an experience that is deeply interwoven with their psycho-emotional experience of themselves and their relationship to their environment.
Working with an IDME is an opportunity for caregivers to learn to offer a felt environment for their little one that allows the baby to move through the world at their own pace, from a place of readiness and curiosity, and from a place where they’re able to keep all the tools they were born with as they acquire new skills.
Families are by nature co-regulating spaces. From an IDME perspective, the needs, boundaries, and readiness of a caregiver is just as important as the needs of the infant. As an IDME, I am there to honor the bond between caregivers and their little ones and to offer support for the ecosystem rather than just one aspect of it. This can help make space and opportunity for babies and caregivers to learn from and about one another’s needs, which in turn can generate more ease, connectivity, and responsiveness within the whole ecosystem.