Due to the coronavirus, parents are forced to self-isolate with their babies. Some parents may think that this global health crisis does not affect their babies, but you should know that babies can communicate through their cries, laughter, and eye contact.
Babies could communicate by understanding and interpreting their parents' emotional expressions as early as the first years of their life.
Hence, when parents are stressed, babies would feel the stress too. How can parents cope while being in self-isolation with their babies?
Here are some tips to help parents get through the health crisis together.
Listen to Your Baby.
Babies cry when they feel that something is wrong. When they are hungry, sleepy, afraid, stressed, or in pain, they cry. However, sometimes, they cry when they feel that the people around him are not happy. Listen to them because that is their only way to let you know that something is not right.
Babies are affected when there is a change in the usual routine, just like what is happening right now. Changes are stressful for babies, so help them adjust by being there for them and making them feel less of what is happening across the globe.
Talk to Your Baby.
While babies do not understand words, they do understand facial expressions and hand gestures. They know when you are happy, sad, angry, tense, or anxious. So parents with babies should try their best to be calm and happy amid the coronavirus pandemic. Babies' response and laughter almost always never fail to make adults smile. Talk to them often and observe their reactions to help you forget, though briefly, about what is going on around you.
Play With Your Baby.
When you play with babies, it makes them feel loved because you are giving them your full attention and time. What's more, when you play with them, not only you make your babies happy, but you even make yourself happy too. When you are happy, the stress and tension that is brought about by the crisis right now are temporarily removed from you.
Be Flexible.
The lockdown has caused a lot of changes from our normal schedule. Work has to be done at home. You are not allowed to go to parks and groceries anytime that you want. You could not eat at your favorite restaurant whenever you crave for their menu. Amusement parks have closed down. So much change has been happening around since the coronavirus pandemic has started.
Apart from that, you have no choice but to be with your babies 24 hours 7 days a week. Thus, if you are not an expert with handling babies and toddlers, give yourself a break from your normal routine. After all, your routines have already been disrupted.
When all of this is through, we can get back to our normal busy schedules and be more proud of ourselves because we were able to survive this global crisis.
