Review: Baby Shiatsu Gentle Touch to Help your Baby Thrive by Karin Kalbantner-Wernicke and Tina Haase

SUMMARY FROM NETGALLEY.COM:

Babies feel intuitively what scientists have needed painstaking research to establish: being touched and caressed is good for you. It makes you clever and cheerful, strengthens the parent-child bond, and lays the foundation for a healthy life.
With baby shiatsu you can support your child's development. The gentle pressure-point massage meets the needs of tiny babies. This book shows you the various shiatsu techniques step by step. The first year of life is divided into four sections:
· one to three months
· four to six months
· seven to nine months
· ten to twelve months
There are also specific techniques to help with health problems, which can, for example, soothe tummy ache and counteract difficulty in sleeping. And there's more:
· Creating a state of calm
· Easing wind
· Calming the stomach
· Breathing freely
· For a good sleep
· Strengthening the immune system

MY TAKE:
I've heard about the positive effects of massage on babies, and I wanted to give this one a try.

In Baby Shiatsu Gentle Touch to Help your Baby Thrive, parents are guided through several massages they can do to their baby from the time their first month until they are one year old. The book also includes exercises for parents, as well as stuff that can help boost a parent's energy, like an energy-boosting soup or a sleeping draught to help you recharge.

I liked that the book started off with a sort of primer on baby shiatsu, which included illustrations of the different meridians. There's also a list of times when you shouldn't do shiatsu. If you didn't know anything about shiatsu before you read the book, then this may help ease your mind.

The exercises for parents, as well as the recipes, sounds like interesting stuff, and may benefit stressed and tired parents.

The shiatsu massages look easy enough to do, and the techniques at the end of the book for things like easing wind, sound like the most practical and useful of the lot.

I looked over the massages for the 7-9 month-old babies and the 10-12 month-old babies, and what they were mostly for. As it turns out, my child is a little advanced for the exercises. He can already stand up at this point (by pulling himself up on something), and walk, if he's holding on to something. He's quite a handful at this point, too, so it was hard to do the massages I wanted to try. He did like the rocking on a chair exercise, though.

To get the most out of the book, I suggest you get this book when your child is still a month or so old.

Thanks to NetGalley and Singing Dragon for the e-copy.

THE GOOD:

1. You can learn a lot about baby shiatsu.
2. The exercises are plenty and categorized by age.
3. There's plenty of useful information, recipes and exercises for parents too.

THE BAD:

1. The layout could have been more aesthetically pleasing.

FAVORITE QUOTE/S:

Touch can have a positive effect on a child's development.

READ IT IF:

1. You have an infant.
2. You want to help nudge your child's development in a non-harmful way.
3. Your baby has colic or you just want to help boost his immune system.

RATING:


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