Information to consider in your pregnancy about feeding your baby – Leeds Maternity
Hello, my name is Becky Smith. I’m an Infant Feeding Advisor for Maternity Services here at Leeds Teaching Hospitals. The aim of this series of videos is to provide you with the information needed to make an informed decision about how to feed and care for your baby.
Your baby’s brain grows very rapidly during pregnancy. You can support this process of growth and development by taking time to connect with your baby, talk to your baby, or perhaps play some music, stroke your bump, and respond when your baby kicks. Encourage family members to do the same. Every time you connect with your baby like this, you release a hormone called oxytocin, or the “love hormone,” that acts like a fertilizer for your baby’s developing brain.
There is extensive evidence to show that breastfeeding improves health. It provides perfectly balanced nutrition that evolves to meet the needs of your growing baby. It contributes to the development of a strong immune system and a healthy gut microbiome, which together protect your baby from a vast range of illnesses, including infection, diabetes, asthma, obesity, as well as cot death. Breastfeeding also protects mothers from breast and ovarian cancer and heart disease, and it’s been associated with improved mental health for both mother and baby. It plays a significant role in the development of a close and loving relationship.
Having skin-to-skin contact with your baby immediately or as soon as possible after birth is a great way to get breastfeeding off to the best possible start. Birth represents a period of huge transition for you and your baby, and skin-to-skin helps to calm and reassure you both. Your baby’s stress hormones will be elevated after birth, and even an hour of skin contact will lower these levels significantly, helping them to feel safe.
This special time provides an opportunity for you to recover, but also to begin to get to know one another. The hormones released during skin-to-skin stimulate instinctive mothering behaviours and help you to fall in love with your baby. Skin-to-skin also encourages breast-searching behaviours in your newborn, helping them to learn how to find your breast and to have their first feed.
Skin contact also triggers the release of your milk-making hormones, prolactin and oxytocin, thereby contributing to the establishment of a good milk supply. It also provides your baby with a crucial colonisation of the good bacteria that live on the surface of your skin. These microbes help to lay the foundations for a healthy and strong immune system.
Providing you and your baby are both well, you should be able to enjoy a prolonged period of skin contact with your baby, regardless of how and where you give birth. We encourage you to remain together for as long as you wish, preferably until after your baby has had their first breastfeed.
If you decide not to breastfeed, you and your baby will still benefit from having skin-to-skin contact after birth. This is the perfect place for your baby to have their first bottle feed.
In the early days and weeks after birth, you can help your baby to feel safe and secure by having further skin-to-skin contact, by responding when they cry, and by keeping them close at all times, including at night. This will help you to develop a close, loving relationship with your baby that will support the continued development of their brain and help them to grow up to be happy and confident.