Things to try
Touch is the first sense to develop and tactile stimulation can play a major role in stimulating your baby during early pregnancy. You can touch your abdomen, move your body and let your baby experience vibrations from sounds.

Your baby will feel the rhythm of your walking and running and he or she will experience the physical sensations when you bend, turn around quickly, sit or lie down. One can actively stimulate the unborn through exercises and dancing, and prenatal classes offer guidance and the company of other pregnant women. Reinforcing the beat of music with movement stimulates rhythmic perception in your baby.

Your baby also provides some of his own tactile stimulation by touching the inside of your womb, holding the umbilical cord, and touching his own body. He may feel cramped or free (especially towards the end of pregnancy) depending on your body posture.

Massage is a natural way to touch the unborn. It allows you to communicate sensuously and lovingly with your child. Through massage, you can increase your baby's circulation which also increases the blood flow through the placenta. Massage also increases the red blood cell count, which helps to eliminate fatigue. Besides stimulating your baby, you may relieve your own discomfort, pain or emotional stress during pregnancy.

Find a comfortable position for massaging your tummy, using pillows to support your legs or back. Use baby oil for the massage – but if you use essential oils, they should be mixed to half the usual concentration because they can affect your developing baby. While citrus oils are safe, other oils are potentially toxic and they may stimulate the uterine muscles.

When massaging the abdomen, use long, gliding strokes of the hands, known as 'efflerage'. The touch may be fairly firm, but don't knead your tummy. Always keep at least one hand on the body at any moment. Place one hand below the ribs and another beneath the navel. Stroke your abdomen in one circular direction. When your hands need to cross each other, keep one on the skin and move the other over the lower hand, sliding it back onto the skin.

Try out different strokes – rub firmly in a circular motion or stroke in different directions, squeeze, press firmly with the upper fingers, shake gently or tap.

The food of love
Music and sound provide great scope for stimulating your baby's senses. Your unborn baby will hear many of the daily sounds around you, like a phone ringing, a dog barking, water splashing against your body in the shower and the sound of your footsteps. But you can use complex, arranged sounds to stimulate the unborn, like speech and music.

Because your voice and those of others standing near you transmit well into the womb, parents can be confident that they do not have to raise or amplify their voices in order for their unborn baby to hear them. Music doesn't need to be loud in order for your baby to hear it in the womb.

Mom, bear in mind that your voice is a much-loved, economical and portable 'hi fi'. Singing is something which is enjoyable and natural, and can become part of your life very easily – you can do it while you do all your daily activities.

You can sing simple folk melodies or complement them with interesting and varied sounds of instrumental music – played individually or in a group. Each culture has its own rich heritage of traditional and contemporary music, and many communities enjoy a rich culture of live music-making, something young children are allowed to share.

Parents in urban areas may find that there is generally less family and community music than in rural areas. If this is the case, you may need to make a concerted effort to expose your child to this before and after birth. Technology has made it possible for parents to select music from an infinite range of cultures, styles and performers.

Make sure you expose your baby to varied sounds and rhythms. It will improve his listening skills and it will stand him in good stead later on if he is to learn to appreciate the subtlety and variation in different types of music.

Supplement your child's musical environment with plenty of good quality vocal and instrumental music (there are some excellent radio stations like Classic FM 102.7, so lack of money or equipment should never be an excuse). Play the radio while reading, driving or cooking.

You should also select one particular song to sing daily throughout your pregnancy. Similarly, if mom or dad is musically inclined, you can choose one piece to play regularly. If you have a tape recorder or a CD player, you may select a favourite piece which your baby will learn to recognise. Many parents find that these selected pieces offer their babies a great source of comfort and pleasure after birth.

Using music to stimulate your unborn involves more than learning music and developing the auditory processing of sounds (which is also especially important in language acquisition). It also stimulates the brain to exceed its normal learning potential in many areas. Slow Baroque, for instance, was shown to increase learning and productivity.

Have a chat
Talking is also a good way to stimulate your baby. If you don't have a great deal of verbal interaction with other people while you are pregnant, consider ways in which you could provide your unborn with more language stimulation.

Early exposure to language is vital for language learning because the human brain learns to process the particular sounds of different languages long before the child imitates them. You could begin teaching your child a language before he can actually speak.

Extended family and close friends can also play an active role in language stimulation of the unborn. Your conversations, and those of people speaking directly to your unborn, will provide the beginning of language learning. This can be supplemented by reading books or poetry aloud, saying nursery rhymes, singing (which can include vocal and music language) or listening to voices on the radio or television.

In order to develop your unborn baby's auditory memory and recognition, choose one short children's book or poem to read daily in the last few months of the pregnancy. When your baby is in your arms, he will recognise the speech patterns he heard in utero.

Parents who have used the method of associating words with events have reported their children speaking these words at an exceptionally young age. For example, whenever the dog barks, they say the word 'bark'. If they tap the mother's abdomen, they say 'tap'.

Go for it. These simple ideas for stimulation can be expanded and adapted according to your own culture and needs. They can form a valuable means of developing strong emotional bonds and communication with your unborn which may last a lifetime.