Who cares for your newborn?

Of course, the process of establishing contact does not end in the delivery room - this is just the beginning! Having established visual, tactile, olfactory and auditory contact with your child, feeling how he sucks your breasts, you can catch yourself feeling that you do not want to give this little man, who after so many torments was born into strangers - you andnot required. As before he shared with you your body, now he can share a room with you. We recommend healthy mothers and healthy children to stay together throughout the stay in the hospital.

Who will take care of your child after childbirth depends on the state of your health, your child's condition and your feelings. Some children easily pass from the uterus into the world, without any complications;others require several hours in the nursery for additional heating, oxygen, pumping out fluid and other special care before all their life support systems are normalized. Then they can return to Mom's hands.

Feelings after delivery are very individual. Many mothers show an immediate burst of maternal tenderness and postnatal excitement, both after the race ended, crowned with victory. It's love at first sight, and they can not wait to pick up their baby and begin nursing it in milliseconds after the birth.

Others feel great relief from the exhausting births already behind and that the baby was born normal. Now they

have a great need to sleep and restore strength, and not in establishing contact and caring for the newborn. As one mother said after the protracted heavy birth: "Let me sleep for a few hours, take a shower, comb my hair, and then I'm ready to be a mother."If that's how you feel and feel, enjoy your rest - you deserve it. There is no need to give in when you are forced to communicate with a newborn force, if you do not want it or are not ready for it physically or psychologically. In this case, the dad establishes a contact while the mother is resting. It is important that at least someone talk with the child in this sensitive period of calm vigilance, lasting one or two hours after birth. One of the saddest things we see is a newly born child, left alone in the nursery and greedily acquainted( with wide-open, attentive eyes) with the plastic walls of his crib. Give your child something meaningful - mom, dad or even grandmother, finally.

Depending on the medical circumstances and your postpartum sensations, you can choose from the following options, from the permanent stay of the newborn in the children's room to a partial or full joint stay( ruming-in).

Babies from the nursery

In case the child is permanently in the children's ward, care for him is mainly carried out by nurses, and his mother is brought on schedule at three-four-hour intervals. When I was the head of the children's department of the hospital at the university, I, as far as I could, dissuaded me from such care for the newborn on schedule. My policy was that healthy children should be with their mothers, and the children's ward and nurses should exist only for sick mothers or sick children. Nurses in our nursery knew perfectly well that the best medicine for newborns was to be with their mother, but they also liked to babysit with the kids themselves. When I came to the hospital for morning detours and my sisters saw my car enter the parking lot, they quickly carried all the babies to their mothers and showed me the nursery almost empty. Sometimes I would come through the back door and find them because they behave like mothers, and not like nurses.

The reason I put a child in the bottom of the list of options is that it rarely benefits. Being a child apart from the mother not only deprives the mother of the opportunity to take care of the life she has been carrying for so long, but I am also firmly convinced that the

does not allow the best in the mother and child to reveal themselves at such an important time that both need,to be together. Communication with the child on schedule puts the mother in the abnormal position of the secondary nurse. I still keep saying to our sisters: "Please do not treat maternal care as a medication given in strictly standardized doses at the time prescribed by the doctor."

Partial Joint Stay

With this option the newborn spends most of the day with the mother, the night spends in the nursery, and it is brought in when there is a need for night feeding. Sounds great, does not it? You get the necessary rest, you can safely eat, and your child is brought to you on the first call. In practice, this is not such a pink life for mother and child. Some newborns sleep very much in the first one or two days, do not give out a shrill cry, which they deserve a quick transition from the nursery to the mother's ward, and the good sisters often "protect" the mother from unnecessary feeding and feed the child at night from the bottle. In a partial cohabitation system, children usually spend most of the time in the nursery, not with the moms. As a result, with these first two options, mothers and children most often leave the hospital as strangers. Now the mother and the child are left to themselves, and they need to develop caring and affection at home.

Partial joint stays usually give better results on a temporary basis, in the case of protracted labor or complications, or when the mother or child has health problems. My slogan in this situation is this: "A full joint stay can begin as soon as the child returns to normal, and the mother is in shape."

Full joint stay( Rumingin)

This is an option to which we encourage most mothers and children. Full cohabitation allows you to act on the call of your maternal instincts, when hormones program your body for care. In our experience, as well as from the results of newborn research, we can say that mothers and newborns who are inseparable together have the following advantages:

• Children who are constantly with their mother look happier, because they do not have to communicate with the constantlychanging people - only their mother takes care of them.

• Full joint stay changes the attitude of medical personnel. In this case, they focus their attention on the mother, who now finds herself in more comfortable conditions and can concentrate her care on the child.

• The newborns with their mothers are crying less and are easier to arrange their sleep-wake cycle. Newborns in the large children's room sometimes soothe the recorded on the cassette with human heartbeats or music. Instead of calming the child with electronics, Mom comforts him with real and familiar sounds - and they work better.

• The mother has less problems with feeding. Milk is more suitable for her, and the baby is better at gorging.

• Babies with mothers are less likely to have jaundice of newborns, probably because they get more milk.

• A mother usually gets more rest if her baby is next to her. She experiences less anxiety from separation, as she does not need to guess what is happening to her baby there, in the nursery, and besides, in the first few days the children sleep most of the time. It's just a myth that mothers can better rest if their children are in the nursery.

• After a permanent stay with their child, mothers leave the maternity ward more self-confident, as I suspect. If the child is in the nursery, some nurses are nursed by the mother, and the other by the child. However, if the mother and child are together, the attention of the staff and the professional advice are aimed at a couple of mother-child interactions.

• According to our observations, mothers who were in the hospital together with their child are less likely to experience postpartum depression.