Skin-to-Skin Contact: It's Not Just For Birth

More people are hearing about the benefits of skin-to-skin contact between babies and parents.  As a Certified Lactation Counselor, one of my favorite pieces of advice for new parents is to use skin-to-skin (STS) well beyond the moment of birth.  For babies, breastfeeding is a "full-body experience," and they need the sensory input of STS to let them know where they are in space, and to send a signal to their brains to begin latching correctly.  Babies also need to be able to use their hands to knead the breast, and STS helps raise levels of a mother's milk-making hormones.  If breastfeeding is not perfected after the first few days of life, by all means continue to use STS to help speed up the process!  Hope Parish and Daniela Jensen will be offering a FREE Webinar about STS, hosted by Isis Parenting, on Wednesday May 15, 2013 at 8:00 PM Eastern Time.  To register, visit https://cc.readytalk.com/r/yn3euqhwql6z.  Hope and Daniela are the creators of the NüRoo Pocket, a garment that holds baby STS for what is also known as "Kangaroo Care."  See below for more information about the Webinar, as well as the "Top 10 Myths of Kangaroo Care and STS" by Hope Parish and Daniela Jensen. 

Mothers Sharing Breastmilk: What's It All About?

I have often mused that there are thousands of ounces of pumped breastmilk in the freezers of mothers in my city alone, some of which they might not ever need.  What if it could be offered to babies whose mothers were not able to provide a full milk supply?  I became a Certified Lactation Counselor in 2001 and heard of milk sharing over the years; I knew it had its supporters and its critics, but I did not know the details of how it was actually being practiced in real life.  A few years ago, Emma Kwasnica and I met as childbirth advocates on Facebook, and recently I had the chance to learn more about her organization, Human Milk 4 Human Babies.  I was moved by the mission of the project and the reach it has had in just a few years -- mothers from 52 countries have participated in "informed milk sharing" through HM4HB.  Below, Emma explains the history of the organization.

When Mothers Don't Make Enough Milk

Nature's design is for mothers to have a slight oversupply of milk during the first couple months of breastfeeding.  In spite of this, one of the top concerns new mothers report is a worry that they are not producing enough milk.  Sometimes this is an incorrect assumption; other times it is an actual problem--caused by a lack of support and information about how to create a normal milk supply, or because of a possible underlying medical issue.  Lactation consultant and doula Jessica Lang Kosa, PhD, IBCLC, shares a post here reprinted from her blog at MotherFeeding.com, explaining this phenomenon and what a lactation consultant would do to help turn the situation around.