London: Parents, please take note. Researchers have designed a smartphone app to help new parents become more ‘tuned in’ to what their babies are thinking and feeling.
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The app, called BabyMind, prompts the parent to think about things from their baby’s perspective and to consider what is going on in their baby’s mind at a specific point each day.
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It also provides parents with accurate information on babies’ psychological development.
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“There are many advantages of using apps as a means of intervention –they’re low-cost, easy to use and already integrated into people’s lives — but we wanted to establish whether an app can have a demonstrable effect on the quality of parent-baby interaction,” said Elizabeth Meins, Professor at the University of York.
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For the study, the team recruited a group of mothers who started using the app as soon as their babies were born and followed up with them till their babies were six months of age.
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The researchers observed the parents playing with their babies and assessed how attuned they were to their babies’ thoughts and feelings.
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The participating mothers were compared with a control group of mothers with six-month-olds who had not used the app.
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Compared with the control group mothers, the app users were significantly more attuned to their babies’ thoughts and feelings.
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“Previous research has shown that teenage mothers show less attunement to their babies’ thoughts and feelings compared with mothers in their mid-twenties or older. Our study showed that young mothers who had used BabyMind were just as attuned as the older mothers who’d used the app,” Meins said.
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According to the study, the young app users were more attuned to their babies than the older mothers who had not used the BabyMind app.
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The research suggests that using this app is associated with younger motherhood no longer being a disadvantage.Researchers have designed a smartphone app to help new parents become more ‘tuned in’ to what their babies are thinking and feeling.
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