AFFECTIVE TOUCH: The Power of Prenatal Contact

Do you know that you can spend time with your baby as parents before birth and that how you connect during that time affects your baby's sense of security and well being?

There are three active partners in exploring and developing Affective Touch: the father (or a person committed to the mother and the baby), the mother, and the baby.

Prenatal Affective Touch training is a practical and deliberate way to use touch and interactive play to build communication and trust for the new family. This involves affectionate games of contact with the baby in the womb through the use of specific touch, movement, and sound. It gives the couple and the baby the opportunity to relate to each other before the event of birth and to discover how affirming this early contact is to their new bond.

Touch is crucial to human development. We require nurturing touch to thrive both physically and emotionally. Affective Touch (preparation affective a la naissance) was developed in the early 1980's by a Franco-Belgian collaboration of psychologists and birth professionals who understood this. They wanted to give children and their parents, at the earliest possible point in the baby's development, the opportunity to fulfill this affective need.

Affective Touch is now well established in Europe and Canada as a birth preparation approach for expectant couples.

SESSIONS

Unlike most birth classes, Affective Touch training ideally starts around the end of the first trimester of pregnancy and offers an unpressured and gradual training for birth and becoming parents. It is uniquely inclusive of the father (or committed partner) and baby who, with the mother, are full participants through pregnancy and birth.