We have invited fathers to participate in skin-to-skin contact with babies
for years. Never have to ask them twice!

The focus here now is on keeping mothers and babies in physical contact
after CS. Sometimes it's not possible, so we go back to previous procedure,
which was to keep father (or whoever mother's significan other is) and baby
in physical contact until mother was ready to have baby on her chest. The
labor ward midwives, who were not so cognizant of the effect of
skin-to-skin even after uncomplicated vaginal births, noticed quickly that
a baby who had just spent the first hour or so on father's chest was primed
to root and seek mother's breast when moved from father to mother. Before,
the baby would have been in a cot, with father next to the cot, and the
first contact with mother would consist of baby trying to get oriented,
often crying, and rarely ending up attached at breast.

Fathers who participate in the first hours of a baby's life in this way are
carrying out a very real task, unlike the symbolic act of cutting the
umbilical cord after someone else has already clamped it (pretty standard
dad thing to do here - we are always willing to give them pretend roles
while hanging on to the real power ourselves). What effect it has in the
long term, we don't know yet. In the short term the effects are so strong
and so positive that I think it should be routinely implemented everywhere.

Men's chests don't regulate temperature the same way ours do, I have
learned somewhere (where? I'm that old now that I don't even care enough to
go find the source). Mothers warm babies up and their chests get less warm
in response to an overheated baby. Fathers just keep the heat on, so they
need to keep track of the baby's temperature if the baby can't complain on
its own.

Rachel Myr
Kristiansand, Norway

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