Posts: 16825
3/2/06 2:49 P

Swimmommy- I had to be transfered from the birth center and I know that my first big scare was that I was going to have the baby taken away at birth and not see her for a lil while. But it was actually not like that. I held her for 15 minutes then they weighed her real quick and I got her back to try and breastfeed (the first latch was perfect.) But the nurses were so great about getting out of the room quick. So put that in your plan, private time as soon as possible. and that might help,.

I came to check the article again. I hurt my back three days ago and haven't really been able to hold my girl. It has been so hard. I forgot how much I held her throughout the day. And last night she woke up at 10 and ate a big bottled and then cried and laid her head on me and was grabbing my face. and i felt so bad and cried all night, but then this morning it was like she figured it out and started crawling over to sit by me and play and give me kisses. It was great.

Posts: 31117
3/1/06 9:10 P

bump

BabyPoints: 13456
Posts: 956
3/1/06 11:42 A

Okay, Happymom, blame it on hormones, but your post made me cry, now I'm typing with a runny nose and red eyes---and I don't dare read anyone else's! LOL

That was a neat article. I am so excited about having this baby and sooo disappointed that I have to have it in the hospital with "whichever doctor/midwife is on call/there" when I go into labor. I hope that I will be able to make clear my wishes and get the moments of bonding the article describes!!

Edited by: SWIMMOMMY at: 3/1/2006 (11:42)

Posts: 4858
3/1/06 11:25 A

Great article, Katy. Thanks for sharing.

I remember those oddly removed feelings right after the birth of my first baby. But as I look at the photos of her birth..I can see the love in my husband's eyes as he holds her for the first time. It is amazing. I remember seeing him hold her and look at her like that and thinking how much I loved him for it. It made my heart sing. Looking at those photos now still brings a tear to my eyes.

This time around--with my second baby-- my bond seems to be much more immediate for me. I am pleased. I still felt somewhat removed immediately after birth, but it went away quickly. My maternal instincts seemed to be in place already and they kicked in more rapidly.

I wish it were easy for us all to fall **instantly** in love with our new additions. BUT sometimes the adjustment and the change can be soo overwhelming.

This too takes time.

Posts: 17519
2/28/06 10:32 P

This thread and your comments makes me remember back to the birth of our children. I felt much like some of you when Chelsea arrived - a big responsibility and "I am not old enough to be responsible for a child". I did not bond with her at first not even for the first few weeks. She was an easy baby in many ways and a difficult one at the same time. She did not like to be held unless she was being fed so there was no cuddling and nuzzling to foster bonding. At times early on I remember resenting that all I could "do" with her was feed her and change her diaper. How come some babies would fall asleep on their moms chest and mine would scream at the top of her lungs until she was swaddled and placed in her cradle. She is an independent child and has been since she arrived.

Aaron came along and he was a cuddler from day one in the hospital. I clearly remember sitting in the hospital, waiting for my husband to come take us home and as I held him a was filled with complete and total love. It truly caught me off guard because I realized I had never had that feeling with Chelsea as a newborn. Then I felt guilty for not feeling that way about her.

Just as every child is different, every mother and child is different as well. The love, the pride and the confidence comes with different kids, in different ways but it does come. Thank goodness that special bonds of love come if we just keep working at nurturing it.

Tanya

BabyPoints: 9899
Posts: 2871
2/28/06 8:02 P

It's funny that this topic should surface when at now 3 mos pp I'm looking back and realizing that I'm finally growing to love my little guy.
My doula once asked me when I was 2 weeks overdue "Is there something that may be stopping you do you think? Something that you're waiting for? Are you stopping yourself from going into labor?" I would always answer her "no" yet the answer was "yes" I was nervous, scared, and unsure of my abilities to be a mother.
I remember when Nicholas was born and I heard his cry my very first thought was "oh (expletive deleted), now the real work begins"
Even when my husband brought him to my arms for the first time, yes I was curious but I really felt no love at all for him.
I felt abnormal because it seemed everyone loved this baby more than me, its own mother.
After the first week when my husband and mother left what started out as feelings of ambivalence towards my son took a startling dip downward into anger, frustration and sometimes rage as this little being cried and cried. I hit the 3 week mark when a combination of sleep deprivation, existing on about 800 calories a day and extreme stress just made me finally say "that's it" I put Nicholas to bed one night at 6pm and just shouted "fine cry it out, I don't care" and walked away in tears.

Within about a month and a half, things slowly got better. Nicholas was treating me to some adorable smiles, that even though didn't make me fall in love with him, made me smile back at him. He started doing cute little things that made me laugh and when I took him out to run errands the fact that he didn't cry or scream (like I expected ALL babies to do because that was all I knew about babies) made me very appreciative of him.
At 3 months (tomorrow), I'm noticing my urge to pick him up and cuddle him is growing stronger. I'm excited to see him in the morning even though I know that by 7pm I'll be exhausted from a day of caring for him. When he cries it takes longer for me to get frustrated or angry and instead I usually feel sympathy for him.
I guess what I'm trying to say out of all of this is that love and bonding doesn't always happen immediately. John Denver once sang "true love takes time" and I have to agree with it. It does take time for you to truly love someone.

Posts: 15125
2/28/06 7:39 P

Marcy,
I think your experience, having a birth that did not go as planned, could for sure be a reason. Even when everything is perfect, that maternal instinct is not always immediate. Having to deal with a traumatic hospital stay AS WELL AS a new baby would overwhelm anyone. It is good to know that we, as mothers, can overcome stuff like that and still be the type of mothers that we want to be.

Posts: 9492
2/28/06 7:35 P

I had a hard time bonding with E. We were separated right after her surgical birth, and I didn't see her for many more hours. I did wonder if I had actually had a child.

I went to the nursery, but when I saw her, I didn't feel the 'aww that's my baby' feeling. I wondered if it was indeed my child.

I didn't feel much when I had to leave her in the NICU, and I wondered about this 'motherly instinct', and when it would kick in, or if it had skipped me.

I had a tough time with breastfeeding at first, nipple confusion, low milk supply etc. But I persevered. and I think that helped me TREMENDOUSLY to bond more to my child. along with co-sleeping and babywearing.

I became more confident, and learned to care for her.

But it did take a while.

I do wonder about whether the separation after birth had a lot to do with it. Plus, recovering from surgery, leaving her in the NICU, and having every nurse tell me how I'm 'supposed' to do things.

but we are now a very well attached pair, still nursing.

Posts: 7145
2/28/06 7:12 P

That is so true.

I feel like I have re-bonded with my 3 year-old. While I was caring for Ethan as a new-born she displayed some signs of dis-connect from me. She has always loved her little brother but suddenly not being the center of my world was harder on her than I expected.

Thank goodness we have re-established our closeness and emotional bond. I would be forever heart-broken if we somehow had not.

Quester, I also agree, the sudden feeling of responsibility for your newborn and her/his being totally depended on your is overwhelming. Once you have some experience, you are used to this feeling :)

Rachel

Edited by: RACHEL_BABYFIT at: 2/28/2006 (19:15)

Posts: 16825
2/28/06 6:56 P

I'm glad you ladies liked this as much as I did. I think it's important especially for moms who have complicated births or have to leave their babies in NICU to know it doesn't have to mean that bonding is impossible or even stunted. I was lucky to feel that immediate closeness and bond. But that also doesn't mean I am finished building that relationship. Now a days it seems all of the advice we get is so generalized and that is almost as bad as not having the benefit of all of these new insights!


Questher, I love what you wrote. It really can leave moms feeling like they did something wrong. I would hate to think that we could only find love at first sight!

Edited by: MY_DIAH at: 2/28/2006 (18:57)

Posts: 7145
2/28/06 6:49 P

Yes, Katy, what a wonderful example of the power of human connection that every human is capable of, even the tiniest among us.

Rachel

Posts: 31117
2/28/06 6:39 P

Katy - Beautiful article!

Posts: 15125
2/28/06 6:16 P

Bumping due to the importance of the subject.

Posts: 15125
2/28/06 9:07 A

I was actually contemplating starting a thread on this subject. Thanks for getting it started, July.

I have been reading through posts in the past few weeks from several different forums and I have noticed that many moms have issues with the whole "bonding" thing. It has happened with those that had a "natural" birth as well as with those that have had a "medicated" birth.

With my first baby, everything went like it should to "enhance" the bonding experience. Natural birth, I held and nursed her immediately, she roomed in with me in the hospital, ect. However, I did not feel connected to her. It was almost like I was sitting there waiting for her "real" mom to come and take her home. I loved her, but things felt awkward, foriegn, and just "not right". She had no problems with nursing, I had no physical problems, I had lots of help. The feelings just weren't there. In fact, it was a good 3 weeks before I felt like I bonded with her.

With my second, things went a little better. I had PPD to some degree with this baby, but I still felt connected with her.

Third and fourth, the bonding was immediate. Now, these 2 births were epi., but there was no problems with alertness, nursing, ect.

I think, for me personally, having experience helped me bond much faster with my last 2 babies. I think, especially with the first, that the whole concept of having a child and being responsible for that child was overwhelming.

To many times, people get caught up in the "miraculous bonding" and when it doens't happen like it is "suppose" to, these mothers feel inadequate, like they are not normal, or they are doing something "wrong". Bonding is a mysterious thing, and just because it doesn't happen immediately does not make you a bad mother. Give yourself time.....Time to recover (emotionally and physically), time to get used to the living, breathing, squirmy bundle that you are responsible for, and time to realize that nature did not make a mistake and you are capable of being a mother.

Posts: 16825
2/28/06 12:40 A

Bonding: A Simple Wonder
By David Chamberlain



Bonding is simple enough, but not always easy; it can happen but may not; and, as wondrous as it is, some have misunderstood the idea and made it seem unnecessary.

Growing out of the loving heart-connection mothers and fathers have with each other is their heart-connection to the babies they co-create. When conception occurs, parents naturally turn their thoughts to the baby who is coming to join them. Even if they are initially surprised (which is frequently the case) they usually adjust quickly, embrace the child emotionally, celebrate, and begin to re-organize their lives around this big event. The scientific word for this process is bonding.

In 1976, this new word made a quiet entrance onto the world stage in the title of a book, Maternal-Infant Bonding by two American professors of pediatrics, Marshall Klaus and John Kennell. With updated publications in 1983 and 1995 the revolutionary importance of this concept became clear and today it is a household word in every language around the globe. Yet, people still ask, What is it? Is bonding real, true and necessary? And finally the practical question, How do we do it?

Bonding is as simple (and mysterious) and as easy (or difficult) as love itself. Normally, the love of parents for their babies is effortless and spontaneous, but, as Klaus and Kennel noted a quarter century ago, things can interfere with that precious connection and as a result, life can take off in the wrong direction. It's a fact: Some mothers and fathers never do form that expected attachment. Instead they say they feel unrelated to that particular child, although they don't know why. They can spend years anxiously searching for some way to establish the heart-connection that somehow failed at the beginning.

Failure to bond can indeed have painful consequences. An unexplainable lack of closeness hovers over their daily relationships like a shadow. Intimacy and genuine friendship seems beyond reach. As much as they try to please each other, a gap still separates them. Other kinds of damage can be subtle. Klaus and Kennell discovered mothers, separated from babies for an extended period after birth, were left wondering if they really did have a child: the birth was more like a dream. They doubted the hospital had given them the correct baby.

In unbonded mothers, breastfeeding was less successful, or if chosen, was cut short prematurely. These mothers appeared awkward rather than confident and had trouble learning the routines of everyday baby care. In more extreme cases, irritability and anger toward the baby grew to become child abuse: these babies of unbonded mothers were more likely to return to the hospital injured. A study of 8,000 women in 1994 showed that unwanted babies had two and a half times the risk of dying in the first 28 days after birth. Babies of unbonded mothers may unexplainably fail to thrive or became ill. A series of clinical studies in California during the last decade discovered a significant correlation between apparent bonding failures and the occurrence of asthma in the children. Such facts show that bonding is a profound reality and carries a variety of hidden consequences for good or for ill.


When first introduced, bonding literature emphasized the importance of a "critical period" immediately surrounding birth, when a chain of miracles, previously left entirely to Mother Nature, would be taking place. Body chemistry associated with labor and delivery brings mothers and babies into intimate contact, where the mere touch of a baby's lips to the nipple inspires a cascade of love hormones which bless both mother and baby. These hormones trigger expulsion of the placenta, help close and heal the uterus, reduce postpartum bleeding, and facilitate the initial flow of priceless colostrum and mother's milk. Meanwhile, the feeding baby would be in a rare "quiet alert" state that favors rapid learning and personal encounter for an hour or so after birth-before lapsing into long periods of sleep. During this narrow window of opportunity, baby and mother, if undisturbed, are entranced by mutual gazing, and experience pleasurable physical sensations and emotions amplified in the new environment outside the womb. Many facts of this kind pointing to the complex orchestration of life at birth gave bonding its wonder and urgency.

Such positive and natural sequences in birthing were the norm for most humans until the mid-20th century, when birth was suddenly moved from homes to hospitals, from care by midwives (mostly women) to care by doctors (mostly men), and from communal practices to medical protocols. These wrenching changes were more than a change in location; philosophy and practice changed as well. Birth was to become "managed care" by professionals outside the family who made (and enforced) all the rules. A veil of secrecy fell over birth as fathers, relatives and friends were forbidden to participate. For a generation, only nurses and doctors knew what happened behind closed doors, effectively canceling any natural education of children, young women, mothers and other potential support for future births. Hospital rules sent babies to nurseries immediately after delivery, often before mothers or fathers could see or touch them. The kind of privacy for the new family to interact with each other-a feature of birth from the beginning of time-was swept away as separation and isolation became a top priority.

Historically, when the arguments for bonding were first introduced in the 1970s, the brazen medical take-over of birth was at its zenith, having rendered parents powerless and made natural birth all but impossible. Birth as a "scientific" process had stripped away most of the human and personal meanings which nourished men and women for thousands of years. Violated were the essential psychological needs of both parents and babies.

If you wonder how such a radical new culture of birth could rise so rapidly, you will have to reckon with the enormous power and appeal of science in the 20th century. Add to this the undercurrents of fear always associated with the uncertainties of birth and you can appreciate that people wanted to look to science for a guarantee of safe and perfect birth-an illusion that has not yet been fully recognized.

Another facet of science helps to explain the sudden deconstruction of traditional birthing. During the late 19th century rise of scientific study of the nervous system and the scientific analysis of gestation, birth, and infancy, an over-confident science (this includes both medicine and psychology) taught that babies were essentially without physical senses and without mind.

Babies, the experts insisted, were not yet capable of pain and even if they seemed to be in pain, it was only a reflex, not a personal experience. This reasoning was used to justify major surgery in babies without pain-killing anesthetics until only sixteen years ago! To make things worse, the same authorities announced that babies could not possibly recall anything of their experiences in the womb or at birth-no matter what they were. Psychologists actually taught that newborns would not know their mothers as mothers but only as objects in a world of other objects.

Given this set of beliefs--all proven false since then--neither doctors nor parents had any cause to worry about a baby having bad experiences before or after birth. Because they were virtually deaf, dumb, and blind, obstetricians could treat them in any way that was considered necessary. Unfortunately, these views found their way into the routine treatment protocols followed by all obstetricians. A little later, the treatment protocols of the new specialty of neonatology, to be used with the youngest, most fragile babies, were constructed on the same false foundation. After all, if a baby had no senses and no psyche, how would it know it was having multiple needle punctures, cut downs and surgeries? And how could it know the difference between a breast and a bottle?

Many parents were tempted to accept the new scientific way of birth without question. From our perspective today, it is an unhappy fact that mothers and fathers rarely rebelled when experts advised them to give up rocking chairs, to give up normal labor for surgical delivery, to substitute cow's milk for breast milk, to feed on a strict schedule rather than when the baby was hungry, to ignore babies when they cried, and to create nurseries at home like those in the hospital. Today, this bad advice has been largely repudiated and most babies are spared the needless suffering they endured for a half century.

Hopefully, parents around the world today are more independent in their thinking and more ready to treat a baby (of whatever age) as a human being. Moreover, I hope they will avoid the common misconception of bonding as a quick-drying epoxy that could cement a family together only if applied during the hour after birth. (In the late 1970s, at a meeting convened by the American Medical Association, doctors actually decided that ten minutes was sufficient time to allow for bonding after birth-in retrospect, an amusing example of the epoxy theory being applied by physicians.)

As we now understand, bonding is not restricted to any one time period. Clearly, heart-connections can forcefully begin before conception or anytime afterward, meaning love is welcome at any time during pregnancy, and, of course, is completely appropriate in the moments after birth when the combination of physiological and psychological forces are so auspicious. This truth is especially important for parents who are arriving late in the process to adopt a baby. All the parties involved in an adoption should take care to provide heart-felt love to the baby at the earliest possible date.

This kind of reasoning rests on new and accumulating evidence that babies share with us the mysterious gift of human consciousness regardless of their age and physical limitations. They are able to receive and respond to the heart-connection we call bonding at any time, and the sooner the better. This understanding, although it contradicts traditional theories of developmental psychology, is coherent with the discoveries that voluntary body movement, personal expression, and sensory development all occur much earlier than previously predicted; that learning and memory are integral to each other and function long before the brain parts which are used to explain them; and, as the study of twins in utero now proves, babies are capable of having a relationship to a twin, and must be equally capable of bonding with a parent.

These data are also coherent with the evidence that babies sense telepathically whether they are wanted and loved or not and can receive and respond to urgent communications during amniocentesis, intrauterine surgery, labor, or during difficult procedures in Neonatal Intensive Care. This new and enlarged paradigm descriptive of babies obviously takes us into a realm of mind and spirit that is beyond the brain.

Parents who are ready to step into this 21st century frame of understanding of baby consciousness can assume their babies are already endowed with the profound intelligence needed for bonding. How to achieve this bond? Just start singing lullabies to them or sending those intentional and explicit messages of welcome and love from your heart to theirs. Make the quantum leap in your mind that this communication channel can bear all sincere and earnest messages. And wait patiently for the invisible "vibes" that come bouncing back!


From:http://www.birthpsychology.
com/index.html