How to Care for an Infant

Caring for an infant can be challenging if it is your first time being a caregiver. While taking care of an infant, you will constantly learn and discover new things that will help you provide the best care. One of the best things a caregiver can do before they start caring for an infant is to ensure they are in the best health. Infants have not fully developed immune systems; therefore, they are highly sensitive to certain infections and disease.

As a caregiver, you can help protect your baby’s health by staying up to date on all vaccines, such as the whooping cough vaccine and the flu vaccine. Another way to prevent the spread of disease is to ensure you have clean hands whenever caring for an infant.

In addition to ensuring you are staying healthy, understanding the basics of sleep safety, needed checkups, vaccinations, safety tips, developmental milestones, and feeding stages will help as the baby continues to grow. Knowing the basics will help you as a caregiver build a secure attachment with infants. A secure attachment between a caregiver and an infant builds a relationship based in trust which will eventually act as a motivator for the child to explore the world around them as they grow and form their own identity.