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October 25th, 2007 at 6:07 pm
Do you have to breastfeed in order to bond with your baby?
No
Is it easier to bond with your baby if you breastfeed?
Yes
Why?
1. Breastfeeding makes mothers release oxytocin which makes you feel loved up and happy. It’s what makes you want to gaze into your baby’s eyes while he’s feeding. It’s what makes you want to touch his feet and stroke his hair.
2. Breastfeeding means instant skin-to-skin contact. How much skin-to-skin contact would you have with your baby if you didn’t breastfeed? Way, way less. Skin-to-skin contact also causes the involved parties to release oxytocin.
3. If you breastfeed responsively, you tend to stay near to your baby for most of his early life so it’s easier to learn how to read your baby’s cues and moods.
So how else can you do this if you don’t breastfeed (or if you’re a father/grandmother/sister/brother/etc., not a mother!)?
1. Lots of skin-to-skin contact - if you let Dad’s job be bathing baby but tell him he has to get in the bath with the baby, that’s a wonderful way for Dads to bond.
2. Spend lots of time close to the baby - carry him in a sling as often and for as long as you can. And co-sleep with your baby. If you sleep next to your baby you up the contact time by about 10 hours a day!
Why doesn’t it make it easier for Dads/Grandparents to bond with their babies if they can feed them formula milk or expressed breastmilk from a bottle?
Because the bonding that happens during breastfeeding has nothing to do with the action of putting milk into the baby and everything to do with closeness and hormones.
Why does this man think that he needs to cut the cord in order to bond with his baby?
Because he’s bonkers? I have never seen any research linking cord-cutting to bonding. I have seen research linking early skin-to-skin contact between a father and his newborn baby with bonding. It also helps with encouraging early feeding behaviour and helps the baby to regulate his temperature, heart and respiratory rate and his hormones. This man shouldn’t be having a go at the hospital for not letting him cut the cord, but should be ensuring that they’ll let him take his shirt off and cuddle the baby the minute he’s born. Even better than that, he should be campaigning for there to be double (or at least twin) beds in each room and for policies that allow the father to stay the night with his new family. If he’s that worried about bonding then they should have their baby at home - way better chance of bonding at home than in the harsh environment that is a hospital.
Yep, because he’s bonkers and because he’s reading that rubbish that is printed in leaflets and booklets for new parents.
I wonder how bad he must be feeling, if he truly believes that this is vital to bonding and he is being denied it. It must seem like a really big deal to him.
Men cutting the cord always felt to me, like they were trying to either claim the women back from the baby or the baby from the women, which ever way, it ways feels like a degree of jealousy is involved. Not saying that its srue, just my feelings about it.
This whole thing brings to my mind a strange picture of primitive man, chewing his way through the cord in order to be a “real man” !!!
Comment by Jules • @ October 31, 2007 @ 10:14 pm
When my second child was ready to be born, my midwives told my husband to warm up the receiving blankets inside his shirt. This was to put his smell on the blankets the baby spent her first couple days wrapped in.
He wasn’t planning to cut the cord himself, but after baby nursed and the placenta was delivered, he was handed the scissors and cut the cord (while baby was laying on my chest, underneath one of those blankets he had warmed up inside his shirt).
on bonding:
my oldest child was born via cesarean, and was unable to nurse for the first three months of her life. Even though I did not get to see her or hold her the first four or five hours of her life, I had a much stronger, more immediate, sense of bonding than I did with little sister, who was born naturally and breastfed without difficulty from the very first moment. There’s so much more to it than we’ll ever really know.
Comment by stacy • @ November 1, 2007 @ 12:50 pm
Ron was never once interested in cutting the cord. That’s kinda silly for bonding. I mean, the baby doesn’t know, and I would think the bonding would have to go both ways, right?
Comment by
Andrea • @ November 1, 2007 @ 2:33 pm
I have never understood anyone wanting to cut the cord. A midwife once told me that it was a bit like cutting through a finger - which just sounded revolting!
Comment by Allie • @ November 1, 2007 @ 6:56 pm