60 Tips for Healthy Birth - Part 6: Keep Parent and Baby Together - It's Best for Both, and for Breastfeeding
60 Tips for Healthy Birth: Part 6 - Keep Mother and Baby Together - It's Best for Mother, Baby, and Breastfeeding
Cara Terreri, LCCE, CD(DONA)
We've updated one of our most favorite series -- 10 tips for each of the Lamaze Healthy Birth Practices, guidelines based on years of research that help you approach birth informed and with more confidence. This post concludes our six-part series. Be sure to read through each of the six posts -- 60 tips in all for a better, safer, healthier birth experience!
10 Ways to Keep Parent and Baby Together after Birth
1. Learn why keeping parent and baby together is healthy for you, your baby, and breastfeeding.
2. Ask your care provider about routine practices after birth. Do they encourage you and your baby to stay together?
3. During a tour, ask the hospital tour guide what nursing staff does to help you and your baby get off to the best start after birth. Do they promote skin-to-skin care? Do they delay routine newborn procedures until baby has had the chance to feed?
4. Include on your birth plan that you want to stay together with your baby after birth. Share your birth plan with your care provider and the nursing staff at your place of birth.
5. Let your partner and birth support team know that you would like to keep your baby with you after birth. With the chaos that generally happens after birth, they can help ensure that happens by speaking up to the nursing staff in the event they go to take your baby for routine care that can be delayed.
6. Take a good childbirth class to learn how interventions can affect birth and your baby, and how they can be avoided. Many interventions can lead to separation of you and your baby.
7. When you are moved to a postpartum room after birth, keep your baby in the room with you instead of sending them to the nursery. Babies sleep best when you are near, and you will get the best start with breastfeeding when you are close enough to see and hear your baby's early hunger cues.
8. Take a good breastfeeding class for the best information on getting breastfeeding off to a good start, including skin-to-skin care and tips for the first latch/feed with your baby.
9. If you end up separated from your baby after birth, it's ok -- spend time skin to skin with your baby once they are back in your arms.
10. If you have a cesarean, ask your care provider about putting your baby skin to skin immediately after birth. Some hospitals perform "family centered cesareans," where parent and baby are kept skin to skin and breastfeeding is initiated in the OR. If your hospital does not permit you to hold your baby skin to skin in the OR, ask that your partner or birth support person hold baby skin to skin while you finish surgery and move to the recovery room.