You Are My World: How a Parent's Love Shapes a Baby's Mind
Read Your Baby
Research shows that reading and responding sensitively to a baby's cues are more important to brain development than any structured learning activity. Babies who feel understood learn more easily, have a positive sense of self, develop empathy, and can decipher social cues of others. As babies are seen, understood, and felt, they begin to experience and have a greater awareness of who they are.
You Can't Spoil Me
A groundbreaking study demonstrated that children whose cries are met consistently and promptly in the first quarter of the first year, cry less and sleep better in the rest of that year. Modern technology can now show that responding to and soothing babies' stress signals wires the higher brain to gain control over the primitive areas. Research has also found that babies whose cries elicit responses tend to develop into independent, confident and self-reliant children.
REVIEWS
You Are My World … evokes the powerful reality of how the parent-infant relationship sculpts the minds and brains of our children. Amy Hatkoff has offered us an exquisite tour of the intimate human connections … from which our deepest sense of self emerges. What a wonder-filled gift to help all parents …Bravo!"
Daniel J. Siegel, MD
Author, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are; Clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine;
Founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA
"You Are My World is one of the best explanations of early brain research that I have ever seen for parents. I would like to get it into every parent's hands."
Lisa Weir, M.Ed.
Parent & Family Educator-Infant Specialist
Schools of Eastern Carver County
"You Are My World captures the subtle nonverbal behaviors of babies that express a far wider range of emotional experience than is often recognized or responded to. The photographs convey the power
and importance of nonverbal communication and bring us closer to the best in humans and in ourselves."
Joshua D. Sparrow, M.D.
Assistant Professor in Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
Associate Director of the Brazelton Touchpoints Center
Co-Author of eight books with Dr. T. Berry Brazelton
"You Are My World should be mandatory reading for every parent. Parents new and seasoned cannot afford not to read this book. If every family began a tradition by passing this book on to future generations, just think of all the happy and healthy children in our world! You Are My World is BRILLIANT!! Kudos!"
Ross Ellis
Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Love Our Children USA
"You Are My World is a treasure. It is a wonderful, concise treatise on the abilities of babies. It supersedes Ashley Montague and Frederick LeBoyer and their approach. It brings you right into the hearts of babies, giving them a strong and clear voice of what it takes to become the 'possible human.' A remarkable, beautiful piece of work."
Barbara Harper
Founder /Director, Waterbirth International
"You Are My World is one of the most beautiful and potentially impactful books our agency has ever seen."
Stephanie Funtanilla
Child and Family Service, Positive Youth Development, Hawaii
"I immediately fell in love with You Are My World and buy it for anyone I know who is having a baby. I have shown it to several people at our Department of Mental Health who are impressed with it as well. The beauty of the pictures and the simplicity- yet depth- of the words resonated with me and the messages we are trying to communicate to our moms."
Eleanor Hirsch
Community Foundation, U.S. Virgin Islands
"Like the babies it features, this little book is a mini-miracle. One part information, one part inspiration, one part love, Hatkoff's You Are My World is a gift of a book … It is a spoonful of sugar helping state-of-the-science knowledge go down ever so smoothly, energizing grown-ups for the good responsive care that all little ones need."
Rebecca Shahmoon Shanok, LCSW, PhD
Executive Director, Institute for Infants, Children & Families
Co-Founder, New York Zero-to-Three Network
Every baby hopes their parent will read this book! This is the gift I will be giving to all new parents and parents to be. I could have been a much better mother with this simple understanding. The world could be a much better place in so many ways just by putting this book into the hands of people who need it. The photography is astounding!
Shirley Wilkes-Johnson
Producer, KPFT Radio, Houston, TX
I consider your book to be the vehicle I've been looking for. You Are My World covers so many critical issues very completely and serves as a great basis for discussion. I am sure childbirth educators and other parent educators everywhere would love to have this as a tool to teach this information."
Kathryn Siembieda
ICCE, CIMI, CIIT
"Using simple words and gorgeous pictures, You Are My World can strengthen families and help them see their important role as their baby's first teacher. This book is a terrific tool for educating families and can be enjoyed by every parent of a new child."
Kelly Berk RN, BSN, MPH
Network Director,
Maternal Child Health Initiatives
St. Luke's University Health Network
"You Are My World is revolutionary. Exquisitely expressed and beautifully executed, it addresses what's most basic and inherent in our natural biology. At the same time, it reminds us what is possible for any human life if attended to, understood and loved in the way we all need. Every parent…should read this."
Sonia Orenstein, PhD
Parent-Child Relationship Therapist