Over the last few days, I have had the pleasure of helping many mothers restart and become confident about breastfeeding. In these consults, as well as on our Healthy Mother Breastfeeding Support Network, two questions keep cropping up: “Can I do it (without supplemental feeding)” and “Will my baby have enough?” The simple answer to [...]
Many amazing changes take place in the new mother and her baby during the Golden Hour after birth. Natures hormones which worked overtime during labor and childbirth have initiated a sequence of events, both physical and emotional in the mother which stimulates her brain chemistry to increase her desire for nurturing her baby. It is [...]
For most women giving birth, the process of birthing is an intensely physical emotional experience – one that most women describe has no parallel. They are extremely receptive, yet wonderfully tuned into their own senses, so that they can birth their babies safely. In this state, they are also vulnerable to being subjected to unwanted [...]
For nine months the baby experiences life in the mother’s womb and gradually becomes tuned to happenings surrounding it. His mother and father’s voices, sounds of various “things”, emotions of his mother, effects of mother’s diet or medications, all are experienced by the baby. As he gets ready to leave the familiar “home” which is [...]
I’m back in Hyderabad after spending a couple of days at a birth workshop in Goa led by Elena Tonetti Vladimirova, a wonderful and wise woman (see link below). The workshop filled me with even more inspiration about birth as a natural, beautiful, intelligent process. It reaffirmed my awareness of the incomparable benefits that it [...]
The Times of India Hyderabad on 21/1 carried an editorial titled “Take it Easy” on a World Health Organization report on rising c-section rates in Asian countries, including India. While the WHO report mentions that in India overall, the c-section rate is 18%, in reality, if we take the urban and semi-urban population into consideration, [...]
What is needed for effective breastfeeding in the first hours after birth? First and foremost, multi-disciplinary research has shown that skin-to-skin contact between mother and baby within the first hour of birth (amongst its many other benefits), is extremely necessary to start off a series of responses – hormonal, physical, and psychological – in both [...]