Tactile Activities for Babies in the Home

Our standard of living has gone up, but for babies, at least, the home has become an impoverished environment. We do much less at home, and those things we do do are inaccessible to babies.

Reality #1

Babies live at floor level

Reality #2

Babies explore with their hands and mouth

Reality #3

Babies know what's up

To expand on the first point, the height of a baby's world grows from about 6 inches to 2 feet over the first year. Almost all of our activities take place at 29 inches and up -- the height of desks, tables, and counters. We can put kids in high chairs, and we do, and that's far better than nothing, but it confines them to stationary activities, restricting their locomotion and styming their their curiosity.

To expand on the second point, babies use their hands and mouth to explore the world, so they need to be up close to things. Standing in a crib watching is not the same. A baby wants to crawl over to something interesting, and put it in their mouth. We usually see this as a hindrance. Most things will not kill a baby, and exposure to the sort of innocuous germs we mostly have around is probably more good than bad.

To expand on the last point, I believe that kids -- babies, even -- know the difference between real activities and play activities done for their benefit. They know what creates value for adults and for the home, what is useful, and what is extraneous. The vast amount of activities that babies are exposed to and involved in are extraneous -- either they are play activities designed for baby ("Hey baby, isn't this interesting!? Do this with me for a bit! Hey baby, baby, try this, here, no, pay attention, here try this! Look, daddy's doing it...!") or they are extraneous for us. After all, most of what we do at the home isn't work, but grown-up play. So, in one fell swoop we fail to engage baby in meaningful, tactile activities, while modeling primarily leisure activities. The work we do at home often involves staring at a screen, which may mesmerize a baby, but provides little intelligible stimulation.

Change

People used to do a lot more at home. In traditional societies, people did everything at home, and that was an incredibly rich environment for babies. On farms, people did a lot more at home, too. But even in the cities, in little immigrant apartments in New York City in 1938, people did a lot at home. Here's a quick, top-of-my-head list:

• Cooked From Scratch
• Preserved Foods
• Baked
• Sewed
• Fixed Things
• Read Aloud From Books
• Wrote Letters By Hand
• Cleaned
• Chopped Wood For Heating and/or Cooking
• Washed and Folded Laundry

Of all these, only two are left in most homes, and those only partially:

• Cooking, not usually from scratch
• Folding, but not washing, laundry

Even cleaning has been outsourced in many homes, and happens during the days when no one is around.

I don't emphasize cooking from scratch because of some value judgment, but only because when you start with a whole variety of different-looking ingredients -- bright orange pointy carrots, chubby brown potatoes, leafy green celery, spice powders of various textures and colors, spice pods of various shapes and scents, chunks of bright red meat, and so on, gloppy cream from the top of a milk jar -- it is a lot more interesting tactile-wise than starting with canned or frozen things that have already been cut into similar sizes and pre-mixed powdered spices from jars.

So what can we do to reintroduce valuable, tactile activities into the home and make them accessible to babies and children? Here are a few ideas:

1. Cook at home
2. Do more at ground level, like chopping vegetables 
3. Get the baby up to counter level when you're cooking
4. When a lamp or something breaks, take it apart and try to fix it, on the ground; no harm in trying!
5. Grow a garden if you have the space, and let the baby crawl around in the dirt
6. Clean as often as possible with warm water only. Babies can crawl around in warm water, even grab the sponge and manage a nibble before you catch them, with little risk
7. Have a big part of the floor or a big mat that is made of non-toxic material, which you can do activities on, and which you can easily clean with warm water
8. Make whole rooms of the house safe for a baby to crawl around in freely, but leave some objects around that have interesting and different shapes, textures, scents, colors, and even temperatures (stone tends to be cool and wood warm); I'd stay away from plastic
9. Heat with wood

Topic for a future post: rhythm. The rhythms of traditional life -- rocking on a mother's back while she works at some rhythmic task -- are gone. What rhythms do we have left?

(Interesting article here on sensory play)