#youarenotabadmother if you could not or decided not to breastfeed your baby. The bond with your baby is built every day in many ways. Breastfeeding difficulties require expert support that is respectful of mothers´ rights. Mothers don´t need pressure, they need to be understood – let´s care for mothers. Breastfeeding should something to enjoy. However,…
by Carmela K Baeza, MD, IBCLC As I was looking at images of mothers with facemasks and their newborns, I kept wondering what kind of a shock this would be for the baby. Babies are wired to look at their parents´ faces and learn to read and to express emotions from birth. A perinatal…
As the world prioritizes physical distance to detain or slow down the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19), a new study from Florida Atlantic University shows that physical contact between mother and infant is essential for optimal neurological development, maturation and regulation during infancy. Mother-infant dyads show high oxytocin levels and are less impacted by stress, which…
by Ibone Olza, perinatal psychiatrist. Dear patient, Thinking about you, I realize you might be a mother who has been separated from her infant. Or perhaps a father. I know of some cases where both, mother and father, are going through coronavirus infection, isolated, without their newborn. Maybe mother is in the hospital, alone, and…
Finland has taken one more step in its policies to support families, not only to make it reasonable for them to have children, but also to favor their care. Let us not forget that the more intelligent a species is, the longer the exterogestational dependent period. Care of the young during those early years is…
The World Health Organization (WHO) recognizes a “positive childbirth experience” as a significant end point for all women undergoing labor. It defines a positive childbirth experience as one that fulfils or exceeds a woman’s prior personal and sociocultural beliefs and expectations, including giving birth to a healthy baby in a clinically and psychologically safe environment…
Brains of mothers and their babies synchronize more easily when mother is happy, according to a new study from Cambridge University. Researchers discovered that the brains of a mother and her infant form a megaweb where brainwaves align, which permits better connection and empathy. But the level of connectivity is dependent on mother´s emotional state.…
By Carmela Baeza, MD, IBCLC My teenage daughter is not feeling well. She´s been running a fever for the last couple of days – possibly the flu. Tonight, around four a.m., I woke up because I heard her calling. She walked into our bedroom, crying softly, kneeled by my side of the bed, and said…
The neurobiology of birth has one purpose: to create a caring bond between the mother and her infant. Nature does not only seek to secure the survival of the young human, but to gain maximum emotional, social and physical fitness. If there is something all new parents find out it is that their infant´s heads…
By Esther Ramírez Matos, perinatal psychologist and family therapist My body spoke to me again, last night while I was calmly reading a novel about maternity. As a traumatic birth was described, after which mother and infant were separated, I felt an intense pain in my pelvic area; I had not been so uncomfortable in…
