Marcia McCoy's post on 'methods' for caring for babies struck home with me too.  I agree, we must be exquisitely cautious when interfering in what parents would do on their own.  Nowadays I find myself saying more and more to parents that it's easier to care for a baby from your gut than from your brain, at least the cerebral cortex.  Funny thing is we are often discussing the disadvantages of over-cognition while baby is scrabbling around skin to skin on mother's chest, twisting and butting its head to find her nipple, after I have been called in 'to get a baby latched', like the baby and the mother are two rail cars that need to be joined together so we can send them off down the track.  

I'm very grateful to Suzanne Colson for taking the time to observe, and write about her observations, and talk about them, and not least, SHARE them generously with anyone who can use the Internet.  I'm pretty sure she has a callus on her forehead from the brick walls too.  

In addition to expert advice, we keep parents and babies in environments that are highly unnatural and non-conducive to instinctive behavior.  I hate to think how many times parents on day 3 or 4 will say worriedly that 'the baby doesn't like being put in the cot'.  The cots we have are left over from two decades back, clear plastic boxes that make babies feel unprotected and insecure.  These boxes were necessary when one staff person needed to monitor fifteen or twenty babies in one room all night.  How else could you check at a glance that no baby was blue in the face?  Somehow we have forgotten why the cots are clear plastic, on trolleys, and we continue to find space for one in the room of every mother on the postnatal ward.  What stronger signal can we send to parents that 'this is where your baby belongs'?  And how clear a message would it be to simply stop providing a plastic box, and keep the baby with the mother?  

When I suggest simply not having the cots, in response to exasperated staff coming out of a room where a mother has pulled her call bell to report that the baby is crying in its cot, and ask what she should do, nobody says 'YES! Why didn't we do this years ago?'  First they laugh, and then they say 'Oh Rachel, we can always count on you for the weirdest idea'.  And that's the end of it.  The only people I can get through to, are parents.  They get it pretty much right away, that babies are either happy or not, and nobody is ever in doubt about it when a baby is unhappy, so if you don't see signs of unhappiness, the baby is content.  The baby is not going to pretend to be happy to spare her exhausted parents the trouble of caring for her - ALL parents understand this, but I have far too many colleagues who still struggle with allowing a healthy term baby who has cluster fed for 8 hours to sleep for more than three hours in a row right afterwards, as they feel they are neglectful if they don't see to it that the baby feeds at least every three hours, not just 'as many times as it wants'.  

I'm more and more intrigued by the idea of doing an inservice where I present bogus findings that exactly two hours and seventeen minutes has been determined to be the optimal interval between feeds, calculated from end of a feed until start of the next, and this *must* be implemented for all mothers as soon as possible.  I really think it may be the only way to get us to stop using the clock as a gauge of newborn breastfeeding needs, because it would be impossible to carry out in our system for reckoning of time, where everything must be easily divisible by three. 

We need to be just as cautious when inserting architecture, furniture and time-metering technology between parents and their children too.   Misunderstand me correctly, I am in favor of technology when it is appropriate for the purpose, but ALL technology should be documentably safe and effective.

Rachel Myr
Kristiansand, Norway

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