Nurturing Newborn Infants Skin to Skin

As a neonatal nurse and health coach, my research and experience of observing well, less well and premature infants has repeatedly shown me that skin to skin is where a newborn infant prefers, and needs, to be.

It is essential to provide every baby with gentle, loving and safe care at all times - during birth and following. Loving hands, skin to skin close to their mothers breast, soft lights, quiet sounds, warm soft materials, nurture feelings for a newborn baby of being, safe, secure and loved.

Skin to skin provides a wonderful way to calmly transition from life in the womb to the outside world.

Newborn babies need to smell, touch, feel, hear, taste and see their mother without interruption. The first hour is an alert time for most babies and critical for firing and wiring maternal infant attachment. It is a two way process not only involving wiring baby’s brain but also creating neural attachment connections in their mother.

I consider myself fortunate to repeatedly observe newborn babies vital signs normalise, as they snuggle in between their mother’s breasts. Warm, safe and protected, and if they instinctively orientate towards the breast, nourished.

Smell is the newborn’s first sense and they are totally reliant on it. Did you know the secretions from the little bumps on the breast areola (Montgomery's Tubules) smell like amniotic fluid to a newborn baby? First home in utero, second home skin to skin on their mother.

Strange smells are considered dangerous to a baby until they learn whether they are safe or unsafe. This is something to be aware of with the personal care products one uses especially in the early postnatal period. Your baby knows and prefers your natural scent.

Guided by smell, babies activate their other senses. Skin to skin provides extensive touch. What an exquisite way to activate all the neurons in their skin as they feel their mother with their hands and their near entire body. A nappy only creates a little less and is practical to use.

Babies are born with perfect hearing. They cannot close their ears to unexpected sounds, so these especially if loud, lead to dysregulation. Touch, tactile stimulation plus smell, sucking and hearing their mothers, fathers, and other voices they knew while in utero and are soothed by, stimulate feelings of wellbeing and the love hormone oxytocin. Young babies also need their mother at all times for optimum auditory and language development.

Babies have innate instincts to suck. Taste receptors are activated by sucking their hands, licking and nuzzling their mother and tasting her breast milk. Skin to skin also ensures transfer of microbes essential for newborn healthy gut and immune system activation.

Infants have a huge need for social connection. If you are a mum repeatedly distracted on your cell phone while holding your baby, please pay attention. Babies constantly try to engage with their mother. She is their world, their food source, their survival.

Newborns are born with emotions, smell and face recognition and prefer to look at their mother. Skin to skin fires and wires the infant’s social and emotional intelligence in the area of the brain called, the amygdala. It achieves this directly and via the prefrontal cortex, the area of our brain behind our forehead that we consider our conscious mind. The first two months following birth is a critical period for social and emotional maturation.

Babies learn empathy through the eyes of their mother - that loving reciprocating gaze and early visual experience is essential for continued visual development.

A newborn infant lying within their mother’s heart field, enables not only hearing her heart beat, but also creates a powerful connection of energy flow between them especially when the mother tunes into her baby.

Babies need skin to skin on dad too.  Did you know just 30 minutes of skin on skin with dad (especially in the first 24 hours) wires his dopamine levels for life in connection with his child?

The more premature the infant, the more they need skin to skin.  Premature babies are less able to tolerate stress and are more dependent on their mother, father and significant others.

In summary, the best place for newborn infants is on their mother. Skin to skin high up on her chest, where she can gently tilt forward and kiss them on their head. Not only is this where babies feel safe as they transition from life in the womb to the outside world, full of new experiences, it is the optimum position anatomically to maintain their airway.

Mother’s smell, soft sounds, soft materials, loving gentle touch, gazing into one another’s eyes and breast feeding. Holding your newborn baby provides many of these, and skin to skin is the ultimate.

Gaylene Hansen

This article is published in 'The Inspired Guide' November 20

Image by Amanda Sears in ‘The Inspired Guide’ November 20