One Thing You Can Do After Birth that Helps with Breastfeeding

In recent years, information about and support for people who breastfeed their babies has become abundantly available. It's been so helpful for families! That said, families still experience barriers and challenges due to outdated practices as well as cultural and socio-economic realities that are slower and more difficult to change. One thing you can do to get started on the right track for breastfeeding is staying together, skin-to-skin, with your baby after birth and through the first few hours. In fact it's one of the Lamaze Healthy Birth Practices: "Keep Mother and Baby Together — It's Best for Mother, Baby and Breastfeeding."

The Lamaze Healthy Birth Practices are six different recommendations that create the foundation of teaching in Lamaze childbirth classes. Designed from evidence-based and time-tested research, these practices aim to simplify your birth process with an informed approach that helps alleviate your fears and manage pain.

To get the best start for breastfeeding, which is at the heart of the sixth Healthy Birth Practice, experts recommend that right after birth, a healthy newborn should be placed skin-to-skin on your abdomen or chest after birth and should be dried and covered with warm blankets. Any care that needs to be done immediately after birth can be done with your baby skin-to-skin on your chest. Keeping baby skin-to-skin:

• Helps regulate baby’s heart rate, temperature, blood sugar and breathing
• Promotes breastfeeding success
• Allows you to bond with your baby!
• Reduces crying

Procedures like taking birth weight and other measurements, bathing, newborn eye ointment, blood testing, and administering vitamin K and hep B vaccine can all wait! 

While this practice may seem like a no-brainer, it's been a long-standing practice at hospitals to take baby from parent rather quickly to administer newborn routines -- not for necessity or safety but simply because of standard hospital practices. While many hospitals have changed these routines to encourage and allow for uninterrupted one-on-one time after birth, some hospitals and providers have not. In order to help ensure that you receive this practice after birth, you can do the following: 

• During pregnancy, tell your care provider and labor support team that you want uninterrupted contact with your baby after birth
• Enlist your labor support team, which may include your partner and a doula, to help make sure you get early and uninterrupted skin-to-skin contact with your baby 
• Speak up and say NO -- sometimes routines are hard to break, so if your care provider or nurse goes on “auto-pilot,” remind them of your preferences

Take a look at the infographic that further explains and colorfully illustrates this Healthy Birth Practice. Learn tips for establishing breastfeeding in the early days and weeks.