COMING SOON - The Conscious Baby: How Understanding the Baby’s Experience Improves Birth, Helps Parents, and Increases Health Lifelong

The Learner will be able to:

• Define prenatal and perinatal somatic psychology.
• List evidence-based practices that support a holistic approach to pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding that includes the baby’s experience.
• Outline ways to improve health practices on a continuum that support families with babies starting preconception that include pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding.
• Describe ways to prevent and heal trauma from the baby’s perspective and how they can be integrated into private and public health practice.

• The Pre- and Perinatal Somatic Psychology Model.
• The Twelve Senses of the Prenate.
• What Babies Learn In-utero.
• Memory, Pregnancy, and Birth from the Baby”s Perspective.
• Somatic imprinting.
• Trauma-informed Care from the Baby’s Perspective.

With the advent of epigenetics and advances in fetal medicine, medical practice now supports that the baby’s experience in utero and birth may have lasting effects on health and human development. Research shows how stress and trauma in the previous generations may impact the present and subsequent generations. We also know that the mother’s experience is transferred to the baby during pregnancy. This trauma-informed, evidence-based course presents how understanding the baby’s experience starting in utero, often called prenatal and perinatal somatic psychology, may improve outcomes on many levels: Prenatal care can become more of a wellness and mindfulness model; prenatal bonding improves birth, parenting, and health in children and parents; better pregnancies and births lead to better nervous system regulation so babies feed, sleep and connect with parents easier; the relationships of newborns with their families lay down patterns of health that create a strong foundation on every level: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.

The content in this module is re-evaluated every three years in accordance with ANCC criteria. This content will be re-evaluated and updated on or before October 31, 2024.