Haptonomy

So what is haptonomy first?

This is how to bond with your baby. I would say it is a way to get interactions and a first relationship with your baby, while the baby is still unborn.

But first of all, haptonomy is a state of mind that teaches you and shows you that you (un)-born child is  already a person, having feeling and his/her own behaviour and should be considered as real person.

How does haptonomy work?

We have appointments with a midwife specialized in haptonomy. She will teach you how to interact with your baby. First, how to tell the baby you are going to spend a bit of time with it. You are going to be taught you to cuddle the baby, how to play hide and seek with him (and believe me, it works really well), then how to teach the baby that he/she can move in the womb and that he/she has an entire space to discover, and also to move the baby around before and/or during delivery to ease the pain.

We had 8 appointments with the midwife starting 24 weeks until 37 weeks. I didn’t do any other prenatal class, so that was partly covered by the main health insurrance and partly covered by my complementary insurance.

The father is deeply involved …

as he is part of the process. He is the one who has the the physical cuddle, as I was having connection with my baby through my body. It is really a couple activity, interactions. Both partners need to ba equally involved. I must say when our baby reacted to hide and seek play and followed my husband’s hand and kicked him to ask to more play, he was over the moon.

It is a whole process to welcome your baby to the world. We have greatly enjoyed it with our first baby. It was more difficult to get time to do that with the 2nd baby as we also had less appointments with the midwife. We weren’t so good with our homework! But that was still very much enjoyable and a great lesson taught to us to understand that baby#2 is not the same as baby#1 and they are different!

We had done the haptonomy for our first baby. It had worked so well that we decided we should do that for the second baby as well.