This talk will explore how skin-to-skin contact, baby carrying and in-arms carrying support connection, breastfeeding and elimination communication.
Through a poetic lens, it will invite participants into babies’ subtle communication and the instinctive behaviours triggered and supported by touch.
Ulrika Casselbrant is a baby carrying consultant and Certified Breastfeeding Specialist. She is the author of books on baby carrying, breastfeeding and Elimination Communication, including Babywearing and In-arms Carrying (2022) and A Little Book About Breastfeeding in the NICU (2023), a resource used in neonatal care and translated into multiple languages.
Ulrika works as a NICU nurse assistant at Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden and is involved in education, quality improvement and the development of breastfeeding and feeding support in neonatal care. Her special interests include Kangaroo Care, Family-Centered Care and infant communication. She also holds a Master’s degree in Fine Arts.
In human childrearing, carrying an infant on one’s body—holding in the arms and carrying on the back, or babywearing—is a practice that has developed in its own way across the world, bound up with each region’s daily life, labour, climate, and tools. In Japan, onbu (a high back carry) has long been widely used as a way of combining work and everyday life with childcare on one and the same body, and tools suited to the local environment have been devised—such as the mokko of Amakusa in Kumamoto, or the kooi-obi (child-carrying sash) of Izumo. These take forms different from those of other regions, yet each is one shape of childrearing’s adaptation to the environment of its society.
In this lecture, I approach Japanese holding and onbu from the standpoint of ecological psychology—the reciprocal exchange between perception and environmental information. First, drawing on continuous 24-hour behavioural records of contemporary households (firstborn newborns), I show how an infant spends a substantial part of the day in someone’s arms, and how, within the flow of evening life, family members pass the infant from one to another—what I will call the “relay of holding”—so that a shared, collaborative form of care takes shape. Second, through motion analysis, I show how differences in the structure of carrying tools, and in the freedom afforded by cloth, give a certain range to the closeness, the movements, and the direction of gaze between caregiver and infant.
What these data show is not an infant who is merely carried, but one who—supported by the caregiver’s body and by tools—shares in the caregiver’s movements and postural adjustments, and actively picks up information from the environment. In particular, the onbu arrangement of “looking the same way” over the caregiver’s shoulder bodily creates a place in which caregiver and infant share the world.
Babywearing—through which an infant comes to engage with several caregivers within the home, and to perceive the environment from the same viewpoint as the caregiver—is, for the infant, more than a means of transport. It can be understood as a first step into society: becoming aware of a world shared with others, beginning with the family, and actively joining it.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Mauris felis tellus, ipsumsd fdsf. Iokjhg Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetadipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Tofdid dslicts it mas ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetadipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua itempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.
