Nikki's post rang true with me, about how skin-to-skin contact can be the
trigger to letting mother and baby express their feelings after a rough
start. Rarely have I seen a mother not start to cry the first time she is
skin-to-skin with her baby after an initial separation.  This is why it is
so essential to have a setting where the mother feels emotionally safe for
that first contact, and nothing would make me happier than to see this need
taken seriously in all maternity care and neonatal care settings.  It might
be as simple as having a sympathetic person there and a physical screen to
shield them from the view of others, doesn't need to be complicated or
expensive.
The other thing I want to interject in the current threads about the baby
with torticollis and the perplexing situation with the unhappy other baby,
is something that fundamentally changed the way I approach almost any
breastfeeding, or other child feeding, problem.  That is, I assume that
since eating is necessary for life, like breathing, or even developing
language, it is something we will always do, IF WE ARE ABLE.  So if a baby
seems to 'refuse' to feed, I look for whatever is preventing them from being
able to.  This awareness has developed gradually over years of practice but
I really try to do it consciously now, including telling mothers and
fathers about it.
It's easy to exclude the cases in which a baby is being expected to eat when
not hungry, and focus on the ones where an obviously hungry and distressed
baby just doesn't take hold, or doesn't stay attached, or whatever.  Then I
try to distinguish between the ones where the inability is temporary and
self-limiting, and the ones needing true intervention.
In many, many cases all they need is more time and more bodily contact,
preferably in the positions described by Suzanne Colson as conducive to
biological nurturing.  The need for supplemental feeding until baby is able
to accomplish it by her/his own efforts will need to
be considered individually in each case.  Approaching problems this way is
easier on my resources, since a lot of problems solve themselves, leaving me
more time to work with the ones that don't.  But most important, the mothers
see that they and the baby are really the ones who work it out for
themselves, and it strengthens their confidence.  Everybody benefits.
We are a species equipped with teeth and the ability to use nutrients of
many kinds.  When we are ready and able to diversify our diets, we do.  The
same principles of self-regulation apply, and it seems to be as true as for
breastfeeding - a child who 'won't' eat, may not be able to, and it seems
more productive and less harmful to consider the problem in that light.  I
have yet to see a successful case of weaning to solids in which a child was
forced to start eating other food by having breastfeeding withheld, and I
have seen some really horrific examples of what can only be called child
abuse, under the direction of health care professionals, forcing abrupt
weaning to starve a child into eating something else because no one could
imagine that there was a physical cause for the child's continued reliance
on breastfeeding.

Rachel Myr
Kristiansand, Norway

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