- Support for parents and their babies who cry a lot and are difficult to comfort
- Support for parents and babies who want to process overwhelming birth and separation experiences
- Support for parents who are chronically exhausted and overwhelmed
- Help for parents who feel negative and violent impulses towards their child
- Support for parents whose babies or toddlers sleep little or very restlessly
- Support for pregnant women who find it difficult to develop a sense of (pre-)joy in their relationship with their unborn child due to persistent fears and worries.
1. BASIC BONDING
What do I do if my baby cries inconsolably for many hours? As a mother or father, how do I deal with distressing feelings of fear, insecurity and anger? Many parents-to-be have many questions during and before pregnancy about how they can support their relationship with their child in a preventative way.
In the Basic Bonding courses, parents learn important principles and practical tools on how to promote and support closeness and relationship security with their unborn and newborn children right from the start.
Overall, the Basic Bonding parent training courses comprise four different pillars:
Stress management
In the stress management modules, parents learn how to use their bodies to better manage and support stressful and tense situations with their child. Simple breathing and imagination exercises help them to return to a state of calmness and openness, even in difficult situations with their child.
Infant observation
Observing the behavior of infants and toddlers is at the heart of the baby reading modules. In these courses, parents learn to better understand and respond to their children’s body signals.
Bonding through touch
In the “Bonding through touch” touch modules, parents learn to promote closeness and connection with their child through physical contact. Parents are supported (through bodywork) in trusting their intuitive skills and sensitively accompanying their baby’s body language.
Parenting knowledge
The last pillar of the Basic Bonding parent training course is dedicated to imparting practical parenting knowledge. Here, mothers and fathers learn important information about the crying, sleeping and relationship behavior of their infants and toddlers.
2. CRISIS INTERVENTION
EEH counseling supports you if you find yourself in an emotional impasse with your baby or toddler.
Emotional First Aid helps you to overcome states of despair and disorientation and to better understand and respond to your child’s language of expression.
Do you always feel at a loss when dealing with your baby because its signals are still difficult to understand? Do you feel like you have your back to the wall because your baby cries inconsolably for hours on end and you no longer know what to do?
There is hardly any greater stress for parents than being exposed to the crying of an infant for days and weeks on end. For many parents, this is an extreme situation that not infrequently exceeds the stress limits of those affected. In these cases, there is an increased risk of parents and their babies falling into a cycle of anxiety, physical tension and loss of contact.
While normal baby crying is an important way for babies to communicate their needs, the situation is completely different for inconsolably crying babies. Here, the help and care offered by the parents (such as carrying, rocking or breastfeeding) have little or no influence on the baby’s crying. Such babies are jumpy and have great difficulty coping with the many environmental stimuli.
In the EEH sessions, we specifically help you to better understand the behavioral signals of your inconsolably crying babies and to leave the debilitating cycle of helplessness, helplessness and exhaustion at an early stage.
Emotional First Aid crisis counseling is particularly helpful for
- Inconsolably crying babies and toddlers
- Infants who sleep little or not at all at night or during the day
- Babies who have experienced overwhelming and stressful births
- Parents who find it difficult to understand their children’s behavioral signs
- Parents who are permanently exhausted
- Parents who feel powerless in their day-to-day dealings with their excessively crying babies
3. EEH THERAPY
Sometimes individual crisis counseling sessions are not enough to rekindle the loving bond between parents and their babies.
Especially after very difficult starts due to stressful births, prolonged separations after birth or longer stays in hospital, in-depth parent-baby therapy is needed to deal with these early wounds of life.
In these EEH therapies, we offer babies a space in which they can share and integrate their unprocessed experiences before, during and after birth.
In the treatments, we invite the babies to tell their “story” with gentle body touches and to share the feelings they contain. The affected mothers and fathers receive targeted offers in the parent-baby therapies in order to better “digest” and process the fears and excessive demands experienced during pregnancy and birth.
How can I find EEH advice in my area?
If you would like to see an EEH counselor in your area, please take a look at our counselor lists in the relevant regions. Here you will find trained counselors and parent-baby therapists who can support you in acute crises with your child.
BERATERIN FINDEN
Basic Bonding – Group leader
EEH – Specialist consultant
EEH – Therapist
Additional qualification “Attachment-oriented body psychotherapy”