Scottish School of Child & Baby Massage

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New Insights Into Early Childhood Language Learning - Neuroscience News Findings reveal early comprehension begins around 6-7 months, and significant improvements in language understanding occur around a child’s first birthday.

Baby Massage Instructor Courses in Edinburgh:
21st & 22nd Sept 2023 + 3rd assessment day- 2 spaces left
12th & 13th Oct 2023 + 3rd assessment day
Cost £285 per person. Notes, resources to personalise, lunch all included. Email [email protected] to book. Thanks 🌻

The Baby Massage Instructor's Course for Aug 2023 is now full. Spaces are available on the Sept & Oct 2023 courses in Edinburgh. Thank-you!
sscbmassage@gmail. com for any enquiries.

Baby Massage Instructor Courses running:
1) 4/5 May via Zoom
2) 25/26 May in person - Edinburgh
3) 22/23 June in person - Edinburgh.

Cost is £285 for the course, including the 3rd assessment day approximately 3 months after the 2 initial training days. Please email [email protected] for a booking form/more information. Thanks!

A widespread myth about infant sleep is - babies need to fall asleep alone for naps, bedtime and when they wake in the night - in order to build lifelong sleep health.

The exact opposite is true. When we accompany infants 0-3 years and children to sleep we build lifelong sleep health by:

🧠 Lending our adult brain so infants enter sleep in a rest and digest parasympathetic state

🧠 Create an association between sleep and a feeling of safety and comfort

🧠 Facilitate brain waves in sleep that are more restorative

🧠 Influence less night waking

🧠 Help them go to sleep faster

🧠 Influence their childhood, adolescent and adult sleep to be more consolidated, better quality, reduced insomnia

If we’ve been trying to get our baby to fall asleep alone or if we’ve been leaving them to fall asleep alone - and we see our baby is struggling with this - consider making a change. If we’re a new parent please know - your baby needs you and that’s simultaneously normal, expected and challenging.

Our presence makes all the difference in their developing brain between stress and nurture. It builds the brain towards resilience and builds sleep health.

When babies and children have sleep nurtured they grow up to sleep independently.

Share far and wide to normalize the support for infant sleep and share The Nurture Revolution 💜🧠💜

And another good and so very important comment. Time for change.

In a week when our government has highlighted that they value mothers more as economic commodities than superheroes raising the next generation, I think we need to celebrate mothers more than ever.

Here’s to the mothers in our life; those who raised us (and those who raised them), those who may not be in our lives anymore, those who are busy mothering in a society that doesn’t properly support or value mothers, those who are the mothers of the future and those who carry children in their hearts and not in their arms.

May we take a moment today amongst the commercialised pink messages to celebrate our strength, our softness, our love and our damn hard work. May we know and celebrate our worth ❤️

Very good

via
✨The nurture that happens when we support infant sleep is unparalleled.

When we hold our napping babies our babies get full body touch, they are immersed in our smell, they feel and hear our heartbeat and breath, they are kissed, they are nuzzled. Their nervous system synchronizes with ours. Every cell in their body is at peace. The safety they experience physically builds mental wellness into their brain. There is no other time other than naps or sleep where our babies can bathe in our nurturing presence and take in our signals in this way. Long interrupted stretches of contact don’t happen in awake states.

When we nurture our babies by feeding, rocking, holding or laying down as they fall asleep we are in a sacred place for nurture. We are giving them safety and the experience of relaxation. This intimate experience doesn’t happen at any other time. Bedtime is a unique time for the developing brain. We cuddle, sing, hold hands, tell stories, review the day, say goodnight to loved ones. It happens in a special way at bedtime and it’s important.

When we sleep close to our babies in the same room or bedsharing (always safely - see the highlight reel for safe sleep guidance) they experience our calming presence and/or touch for a consistent 8-12ish hours every day. This is brain building, sleep protecting and the only opportunity to spend this amount of time in nurture.

Morning hugs that drift into a snooze, nighttime scares helped by a squeeze, games and play at bedtime, cuddles, hands held, sickness comforted, all of this and more are unique nurturing experiences for the developing brain.

When we understand how powerful we are and take in the experiences - we also benefit. Our brains, many of the areas that grow in infancy are rewired in parenthood towards health.

Supporting sleep in a family bed has been the most connected we have felt as a family.

Nurturing sleep is deep nurture.

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Next Baby Massage Instructor's Course in Edinburgh will be 13/14 April, 2023. Please be in touch for more details: [email protected] Thank-you.

Food for thought.

Is an unintended consequence of sleep training sensory deprivation?
Sleep training removes and denies a baby the contact, comfort and context they would’ve otherwise had while finding and maintaining sleep.
A baby who is placed down alone in a cot to ‘self- soothe’ in a dark room has a completely different experience to a baby who is soothed/ sleeps in contact with their caregiver.
One is a sensory poor environment, one is sensory rich.

While some babies may actually prefer/ need a sensory poor environment to rest their nervous system, it is not the preference/ need of many others.
IF your baby naturally finds their sleep easily and well on their own alone, that’s them expressing their true preference/ needs.
But if you sleep train a baby who needs sensory rich environments for sleep into a sensory poor option it’s worth thinking about potential consequences.

Rapidly wiring little brains of our carry mammals were designed to thrive in contact.
The information and input provided to that growing brain through nurturing while going to sleep and while asleep is not inconsequential.

Over time, things do change and our older babes and toddlers often do rest better in quieter, less stimulating environments, but even then, it’s a slow, gradual shift as they mature and activities like sharing sleep and the rich sensory experience of nursing often still coincide.

While having a separate-sleeping, self-soothing baby may seem like a worthwhile goal to make life for exhausted parents that bit easier, we do ourselves and our babies a disservice if we don’t take even a moment to consider the possible unintended consequences of achieving that.

Ps. This is another time where we need to not project our adult sleep preference/ needs onto our babies. The fact that our sleep can be crappy quality if we aren’t in a dark, quiet, still place does NOT reflect the experience of quality sleep for our babies. Two very different things and we don’t do ourselves any favours placing our adult lens over their infant preferences.

✨ Carly Grubb, 2023

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Waiting for your baby to Sleep Through The Night (STTN)?
Stop it.
Stop waiting.
It’s not even a thing.
Stop thinking that this is some milestone in your child’s life and development.
It’s not.

Humans are not designed to sleep through the night.
And I stress the word HUMANS.
Not baby, not toddler, not pre-schooler, not school-age, teen, adult, nor elder ...
None of us, at any age is designed nor expected to sleep a full night 100% uninterrupted even if those disruptions can be so minor we barely register them.

We ALL wake through the night.

Sometimes, in order to return to sleep, we must take action- go to the toilet, have a sip of water, take a blanket off, pull up another blanket, flip our pillow over, write a quick note so we don’t forget a midnight musing, and more ...
Other times, we roll over, fluff our pillow and we are back out without fully waking.
It is normal to wake at night and return to sleep.
Normal.
Sleeping through the night is not a requirement for achieving healthy sleep.

Our young babies and children are also developing and growing at a phenomenal rate and their sleep patterns and needs at night are amplified compared to our adult matured needs.
And yet, their ability to meet the requirements they need to fall back to sleep are often out of their reach unless they have the assistance of a loved one.

Their needs for night time nourishment, comfort and contact are also protective against SUDI (including SIDS).
For all of the obsession in *making* babies sleep for longer and more deeply, we may actually increase the risk of them succumbing to SIDS.
Babies are MEANT to rouse frequently.
They are not meant to sleep too deeply for too long.

Waking is protective.

We can place a positive lens over waking if we choose.
We can switch our focus from trying to stop something that is deeply human to working out how to manage the normal nighttime needs of our little ones while also meeting our own.

Sleeping Through The Night?
Bogus myth.

Stop waiting for the day and live for today.
They are only this little and need you this intensely for such a short time, don’t waste a moment on wishing their smallness away.

✨Carly Grubb, 2020

📸 Vida Images

I was recently interviewed by Madeleine Black for her podcast - Unbroken - Healing through Storytelling. You can listen to it on Spotify, Apple Podcast & here:

122: Positive Touch with Tammy McLellan - Unbroken: Healing Through Storytelling Tammy is Canadian and moved to Scotland in 1989. She is trained in adult massage and when she had her first child it just felt logical to massage her. She then discovered research about the benefits of massage for preterm babies and became pas...

Hello - sorry I have not been on here for awhile. I have been having a few issues with the company that runs this Page/Social Media. Oh the joys! Just to say I am here & in business & can be contacted at:
[email protected]

Not sure why, but there seems to be some question as to who I am. It is always a good question - Who am I? But that is getting very metaphysical :). Anyway, Happy New Year to you all.
Best,
Tammy x

Something to reflect on. We need to change how we see & feel about ourselves as parents - and then change work/life practises. Current work schedules were set by the industrial revolution and the men who ran it. Time for a new way that honours parenting so much more x

Here’s What Motherhood Can Teach Us (If Only We Let It) - Raised Good What if instead of looking externally for validation we looked inside our own families? Here are 5 lessons parenting our kids can teach us about ourselves.

Learn to teach Baby Massage to Parents - 5th & 6th Nov, 2022 + 3rd assessment day. Online Zoom Course, all 3 days - £285. Course notes & handouts provided. Relaxed, friendly style of teaching. Learn about Baby Development & how to support parents. Group kept to a max of 7. Please email: [email protected] Thank-you.

I know it is not for everybody, yet a beautiful reflection on bed sharing x

Why We Bedshare with Our Five-Year-Old Son (With No End in Sight) - Raised Good Bedsharing is normal and it's how humans are designed to sleep at night - in a family bed. Here's why we continue to bedshare with our five year old son.

Why Little Boys Are More Fragile Than Little Girls - Raised Good Why we need to challenge the stereotype that boys need to practise how to be tough and freeze their emotions in order to become a ‘real’ man.

Very good reading x

Shared or Solitary Sleep: Which Is Safest For Babies? - Raised Good Sharing sleep, in the same bed or same room, is the normal way for babies and parents to sleep. But isolated crib sleeping has taken over. Which is safer?

There is always time to love

Never Too Late for Respectful Parenting - Janet Lansbury Since most of the advice I share is focused on the infant, toddler and preschool years, parents who have older children frequently ask me, “Is it too late?” My answer is an unqualified “never.” The follow-up question is, “Great, so how do I begin?” I answer that by sharing some of the wa...

A good & interesting article x

It’s science: Attachment is the key to raising emotionally stable children Though many think infants should self-soothe, research shows that secure attachment is associated with many lifelong benefits.

An excellent article x

The Myth of Baby Boredom - Janet Lansbury Kiley holds up her head and peers around at the other infants. Her eyes stop and fixate on Chase, who is moving across the floor in an army crawl. Elbows bent and using alternating forearms, Chase propels himself forward towards a small, red wiffle ball on the floor near Kiley. Although Kiley had al...