Cloth Diapering Tips & Baby Talks

Posts Tagged ‘discomfort’

Parents can be forgiven for smiling when they hear the first sounds of crying from their newborn baby. It signals to them that the new arrival is alive and breathing. But is this crying really necessary? At any other time it is a signal that distresses the parents and makes them anxious about the pain or discomfort they know the baby must be feeling. Is their joy at hearing the audible signs of life from their offspring masking what should perhaps more correctly be their concern about the baby’s panic? Is the traditionally accepted procedure, at the moment of birth, the best from the baby’s point of view?
To find the answer to this question we need to examine what confronts the baby as it emerges into the outside world. It comes from a warm, dark, quiet, soft, all-embracing, liquid world into one of stark contrast. In the old established hospital routine, there are bright lights – for those attending the birth to see clearly what is happening; there is considerable noise as the hospital staff encourage the mother and talk to one another; and, for the baby, there is loss of body contact as the doctor or midwife holds and examines it following delivery. Again, it has been a hallowed tradition for the doctor to slap the baby to encourage it to cry, as a way of initiating breathing. The ever-present fear that the baby may not start breathing quickly enough causes impatience and a deliberately harsh treatment to force the baby to react. Other procedures, such as cutting and clamping the cord, weighing and examining the infant, and washing and clothing it, may all be undertaken without delay as part of this standard medical sequence.
Like the parental smiles at the sound of crying, these hospital activities are easy to understand. The primary concern of the medical staff is that nothing should go wrong and that they should ensure for the parents the delivery of a physically sound and healthy baby. Nobody can blame them for this, but it has recently been suggested that, in their urge to ensure physical well-being, they have perhaps gone too far, treating the newborn as a patient instead of a perfectly healthy new arrival. In rare cases where there are genuine medical problems they are, of course, entirely justified with their speedy, businesslike approach, but in such instances they are today usually well aware of possible dangers before the delivery begins. The warning signs will have shown up during earlier examinations and they can then be ready for them. In the vast majority of cases, however, where both mother and baby are physically strong, healthy and normal, there is something to be said fora gentler, calmer approach to ensure that the baby is given the smallest possible trauma as it first encounters the outside environment.
What should this softer approach be? It is to proceed more gradually, so that the newborn can take on board the inevitable shocks of the outside world little by little, instead of in one dramatic explosion of novel stimulation. Observing the behaviour of newborn babies closely soon reveals ways in which this can be achieved without taking any undue medical risks.
First, there is no need for loud voices. or the clatter of hospital equipment once the baby has started to emerge. Unless something goes wrong with the delivery, the birth room can be kept completely quiet and the baby’s ears can become slowly accustomed to the clamour of the open air.
Second, the bright lights of the typical hospital room can be dimmed considerably without serious risk, especially from the moment that the baby has been successfully delivered. Instead of screwing up its eyes against the glare it can then gradually adjust to this totally new sensory experience.
Third, its panic at loss of body-contact can be much reduced by allowing it to remain in direct touch with its mother’s body as it emerges. It is not held up, away from the mother, but placed gently on her stomach – now conveniently hollow – and left there to lie quietly in contact with her soft, warm skin. At the same time, adult hands can clasp and embrace it, holding it snugly on to the mother’s body. Initially, these can be the hands of the doctor or midwife, but then the mother herself can take over and, for the first time, feel her baby’s tiny shape. The change for the newborn from total contact to loss of contact is made into a gradual process instead of a sudden shock.
Modem doctors introducing this more gentle approach to birth have been rewarded with far less panic-stricken newborn babies. There are no screaming, contorted faces. The new arrivals lie placidly and peacefully in their mother’s arms, calmly resting after their strenuous journey. They may not be totally silent but the expected prolonged screaming is replaced by no more than a few brief cries as they emerge from the birth canal. These cries are the inevitable consequence of the sudden expansion of their small chests as they leave the tight constriction of the vagina. One moment their chests are compressed and the next they are expanded and this encourages the air to rush in. The exhalation that follows produces the brief crying sound, but this is quickly followed by silence if the newborn’s body is kept in contact with the mother and moved gently up to lie on her.
At this point there is a moment of peace and rest for both baby and mother. Instead of hurrying on with the various medical procedures – cutting the cord, washing, weighing and clothing the newborn – it is left in its mother’s embracing hands to adapt to its new world. There really is no urgency at this stage. The cord continues to beat for several minutes after a normal birth and still provides the vital oxygen supply from the mother to her infant. While this is happening the baby will start to breathe with its own lungs, little by little replacing the old system with the new. Hurrying to cut the cord does nothing to help the baby and only forces it to switch to lung breathing with extreme rapidity, once again putting a sudden strain on the newborn. The gradual approach allows the arrival of lung breathing to occur at the baby’s pace, rather than the hospital’s.
As far as washing, weighing and clothing the baby is concerned, this can all wait. The baby’s body is covered in a protective layer of grease beneath which its skin is tender and extremely sensitive. Contact with its mother’s soft stomach and hands is far kinder than with towels and clothing. Again, the slow approach favours the baby and gives it time to settle and adjust.
Something else important is happening, too, and that concerns the mother. Instead of having her newborn whisked away from her immediately, she is able to feel it with her fingers and, in the key moments of her reproductive experience, to relish its presence. This is a climactic moment and she should not be cheated of it by over-efficient professionals – with what could be described as a partus interruptus. A normal birth is not a surgical operation, it is a moment of supreme biological importance during which the medical atmosphere should always be kept in a subordinate role unless an emergency occurs.
In peace and quiet, in a dim light, unhurriedly, the mother can then come to terms with her baby’s existence. Eventually, when the shock of the delivery is past, for both parent and child, the usual procedures can be carried out. Before this is done, however, the baby can be gently shifted up to the mother’s breast where it may start to suck straight away. This move also permits the mother to take a close look at her new arrival as she cradles it in her arms. This is a stage that helps to tighten the bond even more than usual. And it can surely not be an accident that the average umbilical cord is just long enough to permit the newborn to be put to the breast while it is still attached to the placenta.
Unless the delivery has been abnormally exhausting, both mother and baby will be wide awake during the moments that follow. During the first hour of its life the baby’s eyes are nearly always open and the face to face contact that can follow the delivery is something that should not be curtailed for any mother who wants it. Eventually the cleaning-up can begin, but even then the baby should be returned to the mother’s embrace at the earliest possible moment. The traditional hospital regime saw the baby taken away to a remote nursery cot, alongside rows of other babies. Each baby was then taken to its mother every four hours for regular, regimented feeding sessions. This was a totally unnatural procedure and certainly one that no tribal mother (or chimpanzee for that matter) would tolerate. Unless  the mother is ill seriously incapacitated in some way, she should be separated as little as possible from her baby during these early days.
It may be argued that this is no more than a call for a romantic ‘return to nature’ and that, in terms of modem child welfare, it has no value. There is convincing evidence against this criticism. Back in the 1970s some astute observers carried out detailed studies of newborn babies with their mothers. One group of mothers experienced the usual hospital routine and a second group were allowed an additional five hours a day of cuddling-contact with their babies. After they had all left the hospital, the observers did some follow-up checks on their later behaviour. They discovered that, one month after the three-day hospital stay, the ‘cuddling-contact’ mothers displayed more body intimacy in dealing with their babies than those that had undergone the traditional hospital routine. They embraced them more warmly when feeding them and indulged in more eye-to-eye contact. A year after the three-day hospital stay, the ‘cuddling-contact’ mothers still showed some differences, remaining closer and more protective whenever their infants showed any signs of discomfort or distress.
Clearly, prolonged contact during the first crucial days of maternity is important in strengthening the parent-offspring bond. It would, howeverll, be foolish to claim that it is essential. Many babies survive weenough without such contact, but if it can be offered to a mother without causing any problems then it seems foolhardy to eliminate it simply because of some longstanding tradition of hospital procedure.
Recently certain French doctors have introduced extreme measures for ‘naturalizing’ the birth of babies, employing near-darkness, almost complete silence and a reverently gentle laying-on of hands with the newborn. The results have been spectacular in terms of newborn calm and comfort, but a new kind of panic can be caused if the process is taken too far. Some of the mothers became alarmed at the almost too-peaceful atmosphere. Having been brought up to expect noise, bustle and clatter at the scene of the birth, they feared that some sort of disaster must have occurred and that their so-quiet babies must be dead or dying. Such is the conditioning to which whole generations have been exposed. In some cases it was hard to convince them that their babies were performing normally and naturally. Clearly there is no advantage in taking the process so far that the panic eliminated from the newborn is switched to the mother. Both should be as calm as possible for the magic of the early bonding between mother and child to take effect. This can be done by a carefully balanced compromise between the expected traditions and the more patient approach of the ‘biological delivery’.
The presence of fathers during and after the birth has a similar bonding effect. If they take time to hold, cuddle and rock their babies during the first few hours after birth, they too remain closer to them later on. It is no accident that human  babies remain awake during the first hour or so of’ their lives, before falling into a long, deep slumber. During this waking period they are more alert than they will be for several days and this special level of activity may have evolved quite specifically as a ‘bonding time’, the active baby transmitting signals of enormous appeal to its parents at a time when they themselves are in a highly emotional condition. This powerful combination, it would seem, plants deep roots of love into the family unit.