TRANSCRIPT OF ANSWER
So the first hour after birth is often referred to as the golden hour and that’s because it is vitally important to both mother and baby. One of the things I recommend is to do away with the hat that people put on the baby at birth comes from very old research in the days where babies were taken away from mom and put on a warmer, but your baby’s going to go on your chest and that should happen at a vaginal delivery or cesarean delivery. There should be no difference. Your baby can go directly to your chest and you’re going to keep your baby warm there. One thing women do when we’re not prompting them or telling them what to do is kiss their baby and you’re tasting your baby and your mouth goes on your baby and that helps in getting good germs and good bacteria in your baby that help your baby’s microbiome for the rest of your baby’s life. So it’s a very important thing that we take away from women. When we take off the hat, your temperature, your core temperature will go up. If your baby gets cold and your baby being a skin to skin with you is going to help regulate your baby’s blood sugar, which means that your baby sugar stays higher than it normally would if your baby we’re not on you. All of those things help a baby through that first hour of life, which is also called transition. Your baby’s going from an intrauterine environment to an extrauterine environment and just by keeping your baby on your skin, you are helping your baby through that process. One of the things that happens in the first hour is that your baby will naturally start looking for a food source. There’s a natural transition from the intrauterine environment to the extrauterine environment you don’t have to do anything other than keep your baby near the source of its food. It’s a logical next step that your body is prepped for and that your baby is prepped for. As long as that baby is on your chest and skin to skin, babies often begin to route and look for the nipple. So this is an ideal scenario. There are scenarios where your baby cannot go skin to skin immediately, where for example, there is a lot of meconium or first stool in the fluid and we want to suck that out. But almost always that’s a process that’s very quick where your baby then can cry because the meconium has been sucked out and at that point your baby can still be handed to you and go skin to skin. Fortunately, humans are incredibly resilient. If you have a baby that ends up in neonatal intensive care and you cannot do skin to skin with your baby, there are still many things you can do in those first few days and weeks after your baby’s born to make up for this last time in the beginning and truly get a connection with your baby.
