I keep getting a lot of emails from people asking me for a video showing
baby-led latching for teaching moms or other professionals, so it might help
if I posted to Lactnet about where you can see this. While we're working on
a video that I hope will be pretty comprehensive, showing lots of different
circumstances and ways that this can be used, I'm afraid it won't be ready
for quite awhile, because I really want to do it right, and cover a lot of
territory.
However, the good news is that Kittie Frantz already has an excellent video
showing two different babies doing their babyled thing in her revised newest
DVD version of her video First Attachment, Vol.One. And of course there's
also Righard and Alade's "Self-attachment" video of the babies latching by
themselves in the first hours of life.
Those two videos together beautifully illustrate the human baby's innate
capabilities to latch on their own. But now we know that this ability is not
limited to the first 24 hours of life, nor to the bathtub. All you need is
mom to help baby be calm and relaxed, skin on skin. And patience, to let
baby lead the way.
The Righard video has mom supine, the babies on the mother's abdomen, and
Kittie's video has the moms sitting up, their five or six? week old babies
going from midline on mom's chest to the 45 degree angle that they all seem
to like to take when left to their own devices (baby's hips in mom's lap,
below the opposite breast). Anyway, you can get both of these videos from
Geddes Productions quite inexpensively, just google it, (but watch out,
there are two Geddes Productions, the other one sells stuff for kids with
special needs, they do have a link if you get to the wrong site.)
And books:
Nancy Mohrbacher and Kathy Kendall-Tackett's new book, Breastfeeding Made
Simple: The Seven Natural Laws for Nursing Mothers, is wonderful, for both
mothers and professionals, and in their chapter on how babies are hardwired
to breastfeed, they describe baby-led latching quite well. It's available
thru all the usual places, or you can google it and get to it's own website.
I also like to recommend Marshall and Phyllis Klaus' Your Amazing Newborn,
which isn't specifically about baby-led latch, but goes into all the various
aspects of newborn competence that underlie the infant's ability to do this.
It is a wonderful illustrated annotated bibliography to newborn
neurobehavior. And they do have a sequence of stills showing the newborn
crawling up the abdomen to the breast. (They also have a one page
description of how we do the baby-led approach in their latest Doula Book.)
But seeing is believing, and the videos speak volumes.
This is very exciting stuff that babies can do, and I love it that so many
of you have gone home and tried it, and keep writing me with all your
excited success stories. It's so amazing what the babies teach us, and I
find I keep learning from all of you as you get back to me and tell me
stories about how you have adapted this approach and what the babies have
taught you.
And it is so empowering to mothers to show them what their babies can do.
That mom doesn't have to know how to breastfeed, her baby already knows.
That they have a partner in this. She doesn't have to try to force her baby
to feed, all she has to do is help her baby be calm enough to follow thru on
his instincts.
Tina Smillie, MD, IBCLC, FABM
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