Lactation Assistance Services

One of the Madison La Leche League Leaders, Jeannie Manthe (thanks, Jeannie!), told me about this video. It shows a mother working with her baby, following her baby’s lead to get a good latch. Like the BreastCrawl video, it shows how skilled babies are but this video also shows how mothers can help their babies. Babies have a strong instinct to breastfeed and mothers also have a strong instinct to help them. So check out this Latch Video. As a note, the mother in this video is sitting upright, like most mothers that we see breastfeeding in the USA. However recent research (by Dr. Suzanne Colson, news story) has shown that babies may be better at latch and attachment when their mother is lying down. As you can see, we still don’t know everything about how breastfeeding works but we keep learning by watching mothers and babies.

The more we watch new babies, the more we see how amazing they are. New parents get to see this up close all day long and are usually so proud of their babies. I love the book “Your Amazing Newborn” by Marshall and Phyllis Klaus. It has great photographs of new babies interacting with parents and grandparents.

Babies are born ready to be social. They are also born ready to breastfeed. There is a video on-line that shows a baby just after birth, crawling up her mother’s chest and latching herself onto the breast for a successful breastfeeding. You can find it at this link: http://breastcrawl.org/

I’m amazed watching this video. Have any of you watched a baby do this in person? I usually see mothers and babies when they have returned home from a hospital birth. I hope to get to see this some day. What do you think of this video? Let me know…

While I haven’t seen a baby do this after birth, I have seen lots of very young infants do a wonderful job of latching themselves at the breast when they are given access to the breast and time. Mothers can take advantage of this by spending time skin to skin with their baby and following baby’s lead in latching.