I was thinking about swaddling and timing feedings and my own babies 
came to mind. All of my children were born at home, but I did not know 
with my first two about bodywork and both of those births were very 
long. My oldest was posterior for 12 hours and I pushed on O2 for 1 1/2 
hours with him. This baby had latched on and fed beautifully moments 
after birth and for the next 24 hours. Then he became very fussy and I 
was taught by the midwife to swaddle him (arms down), at that stage 
where I was very open to being taught the "right way" to do things. I 
missed his feeding cues when he was swaddled and he slept a lot! My 
milk was in by day three and as he had not fed enough I became 
engorged, he could not latch and my nipples cracked and bled. His bili 
rose very rapidly and he became even more sluggish. Fortunately for me, 
I had more faith in LLL than what anyone else had to say. I woke him 
and fed him a lot and we recovered. I never swaddled him again, b/c 
after that I found that so long as we co-slept and he was in a sling 
and fed on demand, he was fine most of the time. I did the same with my 
next two babies--my daughter (second baby) was very colicky, again a 
very long and difficult labor--she was stuck for many hours. I did not 
know until she was 2 to get CST for her--it took years of bodywork to 
release her birth trauma. I had a perfect labor with my youngest son 
and he was almost always content. He also nursed dozens of times a day 
and was never away from my body for very long at all. The point is that 
swaddling calmed my oldest son very well, but created a cascade of 
problems.

My personal experiences, my work as an LC and my training and research 
in birth trauma all compel me to believe that swaddling may be 
effective at quieting babies, but is just one more example of a 
short-term fix. I am just not convinced that the goal should be to 
quiet babies, nor am I convinced that any evidence shows these kids do 
not fare much better with bodywork. While one might argue that 
short-term fixes might keep mothers hanging in, more often than not, 
the fix becomes the lifestyle. Isn't this what we so often see once a 
bottle and supplemement are introduced?

Jennifer Tow, IBCLC, CT, USA
Intuitive Parenting Network LLC

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