What Is a Neonatal Assessment?

What is the Brazelton Newborn Neotal Assessment? Well I started back in the 50's to look at what babies brought into the equation because we were blaming the victim at that point, blaming mothers for everything that went wrong with their child; it was the mother's fault and these kids bring something special and maybe the mother can't adjust to it right away in this whole area of sensory integration now. We're learning a lot about what different children bring to us that is difficult to understand. A child might be hyper sensitive up in here, auditorialy or visually, even in here, and have a terrible time and the mother takes the blame.

Well I could see that didn't work so I started developing a scale to access babies for their temperament and for how they reacted to the world, how they reacted to their labor and delivery. What they brought to us from their pregnancy and we've learned so much.

What we do is we start playing with a baby that's asleep to see if he can shut out light and auditory stimuli and if he can he's already in great shape. And then how he comes from sleep to awake, to alert and how he responds as you play with him and does he follow a red ball and then follow your face with this kind of behavior. And does he turn to a soft rattle. You know these are windows into what he's like as a person.

The way he handles each of these things is so important, and it includes reflex behaviors like walking, and like how they responded when you but them on their belly. They start trying to crawl and pick their head up and look around, and so all of those are part of my scale. It's a wonderful way to share with a new parent what your baby brings to you.