Lesson 2 - Co-Presence With Your Child

0:06 - [Jelica] Let us practice how you, as a parent, can establish the best physical configurations for co-presence with your child.
0:19 Today, we'll practice with a child mannequin model, we affectionately refer to as our Elia doll in the role of your daughter to demonstrate, okay Halene?
0:31 Let's lift her up together.
0:36 Get her scooted back here on your leg.
0:42 Now, when communicating with your child, it's important that you're both face-to-face
sharing contact space between you.
0:51 If your child is sitting on your lap, faced away from you, you won't be able to communicate.
0:55 This leads to a feeling of disconnection.
0:59 This configuration doesn't work.
1:02 In this case Elia is facing outward.
1:04 Even though your bodies may be close, she only feels you at her back and there isn't sufficient contact for language.
1:13 Moving to face one another, we establish contact space for language.
1:17 This provides the basis for backchanneling, co-presence and reciprocal language.
1:24 First, you must pair the speaking and listening hands together here.
1:28 Here the child's hand is in the listening position, an example of how the hands should be connected can be seen in the green circle here.
1:38 Next, the child touches your arm to share their backchanneling feedback.
1:44 An example of how their hand gets situated on your arm can be seen in the green circle.
1:51 This position offers ample amount of contact space on the leg, the arms, shoulders, and chest.
2:04 If you were situated as you were before, with Elia facing outward and away from you, there's no space for her to receive your message.
2:14 You're only sharing the space of a single hand. This makes language and clear communication difficult.
2:36 Another option might be to have your child sitting sideways on your lap like this.
2:42 In this configuration, you still have access to contact space on her body and she can provide backchanneling to you with her right hand on your shoulder.
2:50 As evidenced in this picture.
3:06 We'll get her turned back around here.
3:09 Face-to-face configurations like this one, are the best.
3:15 When your child is talking, ut your hand on their hand, just like they do when you're talking.
3:25 This allows them to feel you listening.
3:28 Elia, this is Hal, right Hal?
3:31 Now notice how Hal's hand taps on Elia's leg indicating, yep, it sure is me.
3:40 Be sure to use backchanneling so your child knows you're paying attention and how you feel about what they're sharing.
3:47 You can provide that backchanneling on the leg, the shoulder, or the chest.
3:53 Here, we all agree that we are together in co-presence and ready for more Protactile language.