[0:00 – 1:17]
Meg Faure (Intro): If you’ve got a newborn baby or are about to have your baby, you do need to listen to this essential episode. And if you’ve ever felt like your baby is crying for no reason or wondered why they are, or if you’re overstimulating, understimulating, or just getting it wrong, then this episode is for you. In this episode of Sense by Meg Faure, we unpack how sensory input shapes your baby’s state and why understanding this changes everything about how you respond. You’re gonna learn about how your baby’s central nervous system processes sound, touch, movement, light, and smell. Why babies move through different states from the calm alert state, which is the magical state, through to crying. How to read those early subtle signals. So how do you know when your baby’s saying, “I’m coping” versus “I need help,” or “This is too much stimulation.” Also how to tell the differences between hunger, tiredness, and sensory overload, and exactly how to respond at each stage to calm your baby before the crying escalates. This is an amazing episode. It is based on chapter two and chapter four of the bestseller, Baby Sense, and it will help you stop guessing, stop reacting just to crying, and start responding confidently to what your baby is telling you long before they cry. So if you want fewer meltdowns, more calm moments, and a deeper sense of connection with your baby, this episode is all you need today. And if you know a new parent who feels overwhelmed, confused, or unsure, then please do share this episode with them.
[1:17 – 1:59]
Announcer: Welcome to Sense by Meg Faure, where we make sense of the science and art of parenting. Parenting is grey, gritty, and beautiful all at once. And my life’s work as a healthcare professional is helping parents feel more confident in a season that can feel really overwhelming. In each episode, we share honest conversations with real moms, dive into the science with experts, and simply make sense of it all in practical ways. This is your space. You’re not alone, you’re held. So let’s unpack the journey of a lifetime with Sense.
[1:59 – 3:00]
Meg Faure: I will never forget the day that my firstborn was born, and he surprised me completely. In the first few hours of his life, he lay awake, calmly just staring at me. He seemed so alert and so present and so ready for the world. I was amazed by this. What I didn’t fully realise at the time was that his brain, although beautifully primed to learn, was also completely immature. James had no filter yet. He couldn’t decide what sensory information mattered and what didn’t. And every sound, every touch, and every movement flooded into his nervous system all at once. And although it was a natural delivery, it was in hospital, and there were bright lights and a whole team around, and he was completely bombarded by all of the sensory information. But not long after that calm, alert beginning, James began to shut down. And having had a little snack at the breast and stared into my eyes for a while, he fell asleep. That falling asleep wasn’t because he was bored or because he was even tired, because he wasn’t tired in the way that we understand tiredness, but because his central nervous system had reached capacity. And this pattern of taking in the world, becoming overwhelmed, and then shutting down is the story of early infancy. And understanding this is one of the most powerful parenting tools you’ll ever have.
[3:00 – 7:51]
Meg Faure: So today is the most incredible masterclass in learning about the way that your baby behaves and what they respond to. And when you start to understand their different states of infancy and how they respond to sensory information, I promise you, it is an absolute parenting hack. So all of the states that your baby moves through, like my little James, moment by moment, is affected and shaped by sensory input. So at birth, your baby’s senses are switched on, but they are not completely equally mature. The sense of touch, as an example, is one of the most developed senses. So your baby feels your hands, your warmth, the shift from the contained womb world to the open air. And through this incredible sense of touch, which is actually the most developed sense, his brain begins to form a map of his own body. And that map later is gonna support movement, coordination, learning, and even emotional regulation. So later on in podcasts, you’ll hear of mine when we talk about crawling and learning, the very foundation of that happens from, actually in utero as well, and certainly from birth. And that is information through the sense of touch. On the other hand, the sense of sight is actually the least developed sense. It’s super blurry. Your baby can see when they’re born. And of course, 100 years ago, they thought babies were blind at birth, they’re not. But they see best at about 20 centimetres, which is a miracle. It’s exactly the distance from your breast to your eyes that your baby can see in absolute perfect acuity. So when they’re feeding or cuddling, they’re able to actually see your face. And they also see best when images have high contrast, like red and white, or black and red, or black and white. Those are high contrast images, and they’re much easier for your little one to process. And it also helps them to be able to hone their visual skills. Sounds are suddenly loud after birth. So in the womb, the sound was muted and rhythmic. And outside, it’s sharp and unpredictable. And this is why loud and irregular noises are so stimulating and so disconcerting for little ones. I’m sure you would have seen your baby do what’s called the Moro or Startle Reflex, where if there’s a very loud noise near them, their hands go out and come back into the middle. And that’s because they are very sensitive to sounds. Working with your sense of sound is also, of course, your movement sense, which is also found in your inner ear. Now, you can imagine, in your inner ear, in this vestibular system, your baby was, when they were floating in the womb, they were kind of floating, turning upside down, moving, and they actually felt about 50 times lighter because of the support that water gave them. Now, suddenly, they feel about 50 times heavier, and they have to work against gravity. So the sense of movement and balance of the vestibular system is now working over time. And then there’s the sense of smell. Your baby’s sense of smell is astonishingly advanced at birth. And actually, even in utero, your baby was already responding to tastes and smells by swallowing your amniotic fluid a little bit more frequently when it was sweet and so on. Smell is also very closely linked to emotion, which is why calming smells matter a lot more than we actually realise. So now all of the sensory information that we’ve spoken about comes directly into your baby’s brain, and it affects your baby’s state. Now, before we start to unpack how your baby signals their state and what I could have known about James becoming overstimulated right from the day he was born, we need to, first of all, unpack what the states are. So you’ve obviously got your two very clear states, which is being asleep or being awake, two states, okay? But between those, there’s a predictable range of states that babies move through throughout the day. So obviously, the lower states of arousal are your state of very deep sleep and your state of light sleep. And both of those are your sleep states. Coming up, there are then four other states in the awake state. The one is the drowsy, so that’s kind of when they’re very unfocused, staring into space, the thousand-yard stare, I call it. Coming up from the drowsy state, they become a little bit more focused, and they come into a state that we call the calm alert state. And the calm alert state is the golden state. It’s really where they do all their learning. It’s when those connections are made between brain cells. And then once they’ve had a lot of time in a calm alert state, they go into the active alert state, which is super overstimulating, where they’re starting to have lots of frequent movements and maybe might look away and become irritable. And then, of course, finally, the top state, the distressed state, is the crying state. And babies move through all of these states throughout the day.
[7:51 – 9:39]
Meg Faure: So the calm alert state, I just wanna go back to it, is the state where all the learning happens best. And your baby is awake. They’re often very focused, so their eyes are open. They’re making eye contact with you. Their body is very still, and they’re very responsive. They look at faces in particular. They listen, and they engage. But this particular state, which is your magical state for learning, is quite a fragile state, in that very quickly our baby can escalate either into the active alert state and then crying, or down into the drowsy state and then to sleep. So it’s a kind of a magical state. Too much stimulation, too many faces, too much noise, too much handling pushes them upwards into the active alert state. And suddenly your baby starts to kick and flail and becomes disorganised. And if that stimulation continues, it won’t be long before your baby tips into crying. But that’s kind of how they move up the states.
Announcer: Today’s Dose of Sense is brought to you by ParentSense, the expert-based parenting app that gives you daily support from pregnancy to sleep feeding and daily routines. Take the guesswork out of parenting. Download ParentSense today and use the code SENSE50 for 50% off.
Meg Faure: On the other hand, calming input moves them down the scale. So stimulation moves them up, calming moves them down. And so if your baby was in an active alert state and was kicking and flailing and looking away, and you did some calming strategies, you’d move them back into the calm alert state, maybe the drowsy state, and then to sleep. The important thing here is that this is magical information for you to know. And if you make a mistake and you miss a state and you don’t notice the signals or you over-stimulate your baby, that’s no problem, don’t worry. Your baby will recover nicely from that. But when you understand their nervous system, you can really prevent things like colic and crying and help your baby to settle a lot more easily. The important thing is, is that your baby will tell you exactly how they are coping and they’ll give you lots of signals long before they start to cry. So it’s now time to have a look at the signals, how your baby signals their different states.
[9:39 – 14:14]
Meg Faure: The babies communicate through incredible signals and we can call them early signals or early communications. Our late communications are things like crying, but our early communications are quite subtle at first and they can become much louder when they become later. So there’s four main categories of signals that you need to know about for your baby. So we spoke about the six states, we’re now talking about the four main signals. So the first category of signals are called approach signals. And these are the signals when your baby says, “I’m happy, I’m ready, come closer.” And what you’ll see is you’ll see relaxed facial expressions, soft eye contact, smooth breathing, gentle movements, and maybe even when they get a bit older, a little coo or even a smile. These things tell you that your baby is in a calm alert state. And this is the moment for interacting, talking, playing, feeding and connection. And when I take us back to that very first vignette that I spoke about when James was lying in my arms straight after birth, making eye contact, this is the stage he was in. And I have often felt that that kind of tight space of the womb environment and all that beautiful proprioception, that calming space that they come from actually preps them for those first kind of 10, 15, maybe even an hour or even two hours after birth where they’re in this calm alert state. And it is magical. So whatever you do in the early hours after your baby’s born as much as possible, really just connect with them, hold them, eye contact, feeding, eye contact. It’s just a wonderful time for interaction. So that’s our first type of signal. It’s called approach signals. The second type of signal are the warning signals. And these are the signals that babies give that say, “Help me, I’m getting a bit overloaded. I’m becoming overstimulated. I’m moving from calm alert into active alert.” Your baby may bring his hands to his face and start sucking on his fingers. He might clench his fists, stiffen his legs. If you have a prem baby, they might do a salute, which is where they put their arms up straight in front of them. They might look drowsy or they might even curl into a foetal position and or simply look away. And so these are all signals that your baby has had enough and you need to really be cautious and you need to help them to self-soothe because these are all little self-soothing attempts that they’re doing. And this is often where as new parents, we accidentally misread our baby and we misread their signals. We think finger sucking is hunger, looking away is boredom, but the reality is that finger sucking, looking away are early signals of overstimulation. So what your baby’s actually saying to you is, “Please reduce the input.” So if we respond here by lowering stimulation, holding quietly, swaddling, dim lights, we can actually often bring their state down and prevent that crying state altogether. All right, so the third category of signals is of course your fussing or stress signals. And this is your baby saying “back off, I have had enough.” And our prem babies do this very, very clearly. So at this point, your baby’s usually overwhelmed and they can’t actually self-calm anymore. So this is things like squirming or arching or frantic movements or glassy eyes, grimacing, yawning, hiccups, going blue around the mouth and irregular breathing. And all of these things lumped together say, “I’m completely overstimulated,” okay? And often we see this and we think, “Oh my goodness, my baby’s about to start with colic.” And that really is not true. It is very often that when your baby is starting to become overstimulated, they will actually end up crying. And so it’s not necessarily colic and discomfort from the abdominal system, but it’s actually that they are in sensory overload. And then finally, obviously our fourth signal, which is our very loud signal is crying. So crying is not the start of communication, it’s their last resort. By the time your baby’s crying inconsolably, his nervous system is disorganised and he needs containment, calm and a reduction of the sensory input, not more stimulation. So very often we miss these early signals and we end up just dealing with the loudest ones. And that’s often when we’ve got these babies that are so-called fussy, colicky and very sensitive. All right, so how do we prevent this from happening? What can we do? So the answer lies in using sensory input intentionally. So just like caffeine or coffee stimulates adults and a tranquil massage calms us, sensory input can either stimulate or calm your baby. So let’s think through the things that can actually calm them and also stimulate them. So deep touch pressure, neutral warmth and slow rhythmical movements are all very soothing, okay? Another way to calm your baby down is to have some dim lighting, maybe even some white noise and some familiar smells. These are the things that calm their nervous system. And what I’ve always said in the book, Baby Sense, and I also did it in the podcast at the beginning of the year, is if you wanna know what’s gonna soothe your baby, you need to go back to the world of the womb. So listen to what I had said. Deep touch, like the squeeze of the uterus. Neutral warmth, like the amniotic fluid. Slow rhythmical movements, like your rhythmical movement when you were pregnant. Dim lighting, it’s dark in the womb. White noise, the sound of your body and familiar smells. These things are just taking the womb world, reenacting them and delivering them to your baby so that they can soothe. On the other side, there are things that are stimulating and can raise our baby’s state and eventually make them more fussy. Things like light touch, unpredictable handling, bright lights, loud or fluctuating noise, strong smells. All of these things stimulate our babies. And these things are things that weren’t available to them in the womb and so they become overstimulating afterwards. So your aim with your newborn baby is not to remove stimulation completely, but to match that sensory input with your baby’s state. So you think about it. When your baby is calm and alert, interact. Because why? They’re learning. It’s so incredibly magical. When your baby gives warning signals, reduce the input. Less is more, okay? When your baby starts to fuss, remove them from stimulation and contain them with things like swaddling or settle them to sleep. And finally, when your baby cries, calm them first because that’s the way that you’re gonna connect with them.
[14:14 – 15:58]
Meg Faure: All right. So I wanna kind of leave you with a little bit of a picture, again, of my little James. James, who had been obviously etched in my mind for those hours after his birth, but I’m now gonna tell you about him at six weeks old. So at six weeks old, we decided to have him christened and we took him up to Johannesburg and we attended a huge, busy family gathering. And everybody was there holding him, passing him around. He had a very scratchy lace christening dress that I had worn as a baby. And by the end of the day, can you imagine what happened? He started to scream. Luckily, by six weeks old, I started to recognise the signals. So what I did was I swaddled him really, really tightly and in the swaddle, which gave him the deep pressure, I placed him in a sling. So I had this amazing carrier that I used to carry him with. And that provided deep pressure, warmth, rhythmic movement, my smell and my voice. And what did we do? We didn’t stick around where the loud noises were and the bright lights and the noisy environment. We went for a walk through the garden. And slowly, at that point in the evening, James’ body softened, his breathing slowed and his nervous system settled. This wasn’t spoiling him. And I never ever thought, it never crossed my mind that I was spoiling him. I knew my baby was dysregulated and that I was the only secret to co-regulating or regulating with him. So that is what co-regulation is. He can’t self-regulate, I’ll do it for him. Over time, James learned to self-calm. He sucked his hands, he curled his body. He looked away when he had enough. And I learned those signals. And so he never had to get, well, he did occasionally, but he wouldn’t have had to get to that crying stage because I would have picked it up earlier. So the goal is not to have a quiet baby, but to have a regulated baby and to help them to stay in that self-regulated state. So this is the magic of the sensory world of the womb. If we can replicate it afterwards to keep containing our baby’s states. So remember those states of infancy and remember how magical that calm alert state is and the incredible things that you can do when your baby is in that calm alert state. Remember that your warning signs are your early signs. And if you don’t watch them, they can escalate into crying and fussing. So that is the beginning of your journey, understanding your baby’s states, understanding their signals. And I hope that you found some nuggets of wisdom in here that you can take away and work on with your baby. And please do comment below and tell us all about how you can put this into action.
[15:58 – 19:26]
Meg Faure: Thank you for joining me today. I hope today’s conversation brought you a little more clarity, calm, and confidence on your parenting journey. If you enjoyed the episode, please do share it with a friend who needs to hear it today and also go and subscribe to the podcast so you never miss out on an episode. I’ll be back next week with another episode, same time, same place and always here to support you. And in the meantime, download the ParentSense app to take the guesswork out of feeding, sleep, weaning, routines and everything in between.
Announcer: What are you going to do? Today’s Dose of Sense is brought to you by ParentSense, the expert-based parenting app that gives you daily support from pregnancy to sleep feeding and daily routines. Take the guesswork out of parenting, download ParentSense today, and use the code SENSE50 for 50% off.
Meg Faure: What is your job? We understand that your baby’s brain’s job is to filter information and it doesn’t do it well. What are you going to do? Well, of course, your role is to act as your baby’s sensory filter, reducing, structuring, and shaping the input that they receive so they do not become overwhelmed. If you understand this, you’re able to develop sensory eyes. I always talk about the parent’s ability to be able to look around the environment, to know what could be overstimulating your baby, to understand what to dampen down and to understand a little bit more about what’s going on for your baby so you can be that habituator for them. It is one of the reasons why swaddling works. Swaddling gives our babies proprioception or deep pressure. When we do that, we take away all of the peripheral light touch pressure. We take away the Moro and startle reflex that causes babies to feel very unsettled. We control their environment. We control what goes in simply by swaddling them. It is also why white noise works. All of those peripheral sounds that are coming in from the environment and are overwhelming your baby, when you put white noise on in their bedroom, you’re able to actually dampen their nervous system so that they don’t listen to every sound. You are habituating the auditory space for them. It is also why rocking works because your baby’s central nervous system has been so used to that lulling feel of movement in utero that when you rock your baby, you help to soothe them and soothe their central nervous system. It is also why dim lights work. Think about the intrauterine space. It’s dull. It’s dim. Your baby doesn’t have to make sense of sharp lines and sharp colours. By dimming the environment in the nursery, you can really help to habituate the visual system. It is also why neutral warmth feels safe. Babies are used to being the same temperature all the time and so become very disconcerted when they’re suddenly changing temperature, like getting into or out of a bath. And it is also why slow, predictable routines calm your baby’s nervous system. You’re not spoiling your baby by doing these things. You are replicating the womb world, an environment that was perfectly designed to keep your baby calm, regulated and primed for development. Let’s take a little trip back to the womb, to that original sensory sanctuary that your baby was in. So understanding what sensory life was like before birth will give us context for what we can do afterwards to calm their world. So let’s think about the sense of touch in utero. Think about what your baby was feeling in utero. What do you think it was? Towards the end of the last trimester, your baby was feeling constant deep pressure, like a full body hug all the time. They were feeling their own body, the feeling of their hands, their mouth and umbilical cord. They felt the skin of the inside of your womb and of the placenta. And they felt neutral warmth, a temperature that was always consistent. Now hold that image in your mind because you are going to want to reenact that once your baby is born. Deep pressure, soft touch, skin to skin and neutral warmth. Let’s think about the sounds that your baby was hearing in utero. Do you know that by 24 weeks gestation your baby was already starting to learn from the sounds in utero? What was your baby hearing? It was muted, not loud, not jarring. And there was all that incredible white noise, the rhythmic swishes of your blood in your veins, the gurgles of your tummy and your heartbeat. And then of course the distant sound of your and possibly dad’s voice too. These are the sounds that will be comforting for your baby after they are born.
[19:26 – 22:51]
Meg Faure: Let’s think about the sense of sight. Well of course the most underdeveloped sense, simply because there’s not a lot going on in there. Your baby exists almost in complete darkness in utero. When light does shine on the tummy it is very muted light. It has shades of reds and it is very calming for your baby. There is almost complete darkness and no contrasting colours. So that black, red and white mobile that your baby is dealing with now, you can understand why it’s overstimulating. Let’s take a moment to think about the sense of movement. Well the vestibular system develops alongside the auditory system. And so by the second trimester your baby is already starting to perceive movement. And that’s one of the reasons why they turn upside down towards birth so that they can come out with their head down. Now what are they feeling in utero? It’s that constant rocking and floating, that sense of gravity-less motion. When you lie down to sleep at night when you’re pregnant, your baby will very often actually get more active. And that’s because that constant rocking lulls them to sleep. Then let’s talk about smell and taste, which are joint senses. And so in utero your baby takes in smells and tastes things through their sense of taste and smell, their chemical receptors in the nasal passages and also on the tongue. And what they’re feeling is the amniotic fluid and the flavour of that is influenced by your diet. They love the taste of sweet flavours. And then finally there’s very little gravity. And so your baby’s response to movement is that they feel weightless and they move against resistance. The womb is a masterpiece of soothing sensory design. It’s no wonder the outside world with all its harsh lights, its jarring noises, its unpredictable movement and gravity can feel overwhelming. Now your task is not to eliminate stimulation but to make the transition gentle. This sets the tone for emotional development, for attachment, for sleep, for calming and for behaviour in the months and years to come. So there you have it, chapter one of Baby Sense, a little look at what your baby’s experiencing immediately after birth and a sense of why this is so important for calming and soothing your baby and for their development later. So as we finish off, I’m going to bring a mom’s question into our episode. She writes, “Meg, my newborn seems so unsettled. She startles at every little noise. She hates being put down and she gets overwhelmed so quickly. Am I doing something wrong or is her behaviour normal?” So in the early days, little ones are very attached to their parents for soothing. In fact, almost everything in your baby’s world, as well as in their body, is geared for not being calm. So as an example, the Moro and startle reflex that I’ve already spoken about moves your baby’s arms away from midline, making them super disconcerted. Most of their movements are governed by reflexes and so they have these jerky little movements and all of the information that comes in from their body is actually disarming for them. This little one startles at every noise, which we understand because the womb world was so calming and now her sensory system cannot habituate it. She doesn’t like being put down because she’s used to the soft lulling movement of the womb and she becomes overwhelmed so quickly simply because she’s overstimulated and doesn’t have the ability to habituate her environment. So is this mom doing anything wrong? No.
[22:51 – 25:01]
Meg Faure: She needs to hold and cuddle and nurture her in a soothing way. She needs to develop eyes that will look for all the overstimulating information in the room. So look out for loud noises, try and create a muted, calming space and she doesn’t need to put her baby down. She can hold her baby in a sling or a carrier and I have a couple of really favourite carriers. I love our soft carriers like the Snuggle Roo carrier, our soft wrap carriers and putting your baby up against your body after they’re born is really, really an amazing thing to do. If somebody says to you, “Put your baby down, you’re spoiling them,” don’t listen to them. This is not the stage of their lives where they are becoming spoiled. They’re not learning a habit at this stage. The reason your baby’s wanting to be held all the time is because they’ve been so used to it from inside the womb world. So nurture and cuddle and develop sensory eyes. That is very, very important. And then the last piece I would recommend to this mom is to start to look at your little one’s routine and there you can use the ParentSense app to help you to define a gentle routine for newborn babies by watching their awake times. Babies need to sleep regularly in order to stay self-regulated. So there you have it, a little bit of the science with a whole lot of the sense. And I hope that you have enjoyed this episode today. If you have, please share it with a mom, give us some feedback if you like this new format and listen in next month when I’ll be bringing you another chapter of one of the Sense Series books. Thank you for joining me today. I hope today’s conversation brought you a little more clarity, calm and confidence on your parenting journey. If you enjoyed the episode, please do share it with a friend who needs to hear it today and also go and subscribe to the podcast so you never miss out on an episode. I’ll be back next week with another episode, same time, same place and always here to support you. And in the meantime, download the ParentSense app to take the guesswork out of feeding, sleep, weaning, routines and everything in between.
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