Breastfeeding 101: The First 48 Hours, Part One

Hours 1-3 after birth.

I often hear from anxious expectant Mums "How do I make sure my baby latches on properly after they are born?" Well firstly I want to address two crucial words in that sentence: "make" and "properly". Anyone who has ever had a baby will tell you that you can't "make" a baby do anything!

Babies are born with the natural instinct to seek the breast, find it and latch on. So you don't really need to DO anything! Let's face it, if you just birthed a human you are probably going to want to take a beat to meet them, to count their fingers and toes and to look into the eyes of this little being you spent 9+ months growing. Give yourself time to breathe mama!

All your baby needs to try and breastfeed for the first time is access to your body, and time. Babies are not born starving hungry. Let's think about it logically, you have grown them from a tiny thing, (the size of a poppy seed) to a beautiful baby! Babies have been fed and nourished in the womb, they do not come out needing to eat, they come out needing to suck.

Babies have tiny, tiny stomachs - the size of a cherry - so if you had a gallon of milk pouring out of your breasts on day one, you would very quickly have them coughing and sputtering! This is the first time your baby has been asked to breathe air and to use their mouths to eat, that will take some time to get used to. Babies do not seek the breast to eat, they seek the breast to satisfy the biological need to suck. They do not equate their mouths with food (thank you umbilical cord!), so they can hardly be expected to know that the breast is where food comes from. They only know that they are driven in a very primal way to find the breast and suck, they will soon catch on to the why later.

Also, please don't worry that you won't have enough milk in the beginning. A newborn does not need one drop of milk during the first 24-48 hours of life! When they breathe for the first time, their lungs inflate with air and the fluid from their lungs gets reabsorbed back into their body and hydrates them for 24-48 hours. They also come with a little extra fat, like a lunch box, that provides them with nutrients for the first 24-48 hours. This is why all babies pee and poo in the hospital and they all tend to lose weight in the first few days; they aren't eating much and they are peeing and pooing all they have been storing up in the womb!

So, babies are not born hungry, they are born to suck! As for latching on "properly", babies don't need to latch and breastfeed vigorously in the first couple of hours after birth, all they need to do is to get to know where your breasts are and explore them. Lie back and relax, support baby with your body and you may be surprised by your little ones abilities! The most important things you can give your baby in the first 48 hours of life is time and access to your body. We are mammals, we are a carry species and we are tummy feeders. So babies need to be on their tummies, on your body, in order to "activate" their natural feeding behaviours.

Let's suppose you are a mama cat and you have just birthed 6 babies; you are not going to have the energy or the desire to "latch" them all on "properly". You lie back and give them access to your body and let them figure it out; they will soon get the hang of it! For many of us, waiting is not doing, and so we may be tempted to try and make the baby latch, but babies are sent here to teach us patience and to surrender control (see above re you can't make a baby do anything!)

That first "latch" onto the breast could take anywhere from 5 to 90 minutes after birth (longer if there is some sort of intervention that separates Mum and baby) and even if all baby does when they get there is lick and snuffle at the breast, that's fine! You may want to try a little hand expression to see if you can get a little bead of colostrum out to help motivate your baby with the scent and taste of it, but if you don't see anything at this stage, also fine! Remember that baby isn't hungry, they are just trying to figure how what getting lunch outside the womb might look like!

See this wonderful instagram post on the Golden Hour and how babies are driven to begin the Breastcrawl soon after birth if given the right circumstances to try. This gives you all the reasons you need to lie back, rest and try to relax as you get to know your new baby!

Part Two coming soon!