Bonding With Your Newborn

Bonding with your newborn.

Join twin mom and blogger Giuditta Tornetta, progressive mom Julie Hale, and Early Development Specialist Marcy Axness as they review bonding with your newborn. Every woman is different and so is the process of bonding. Some parents might fall in love right away, and others might need more time. Understand that it is ok. You should never think you need to feel a certain way or a way others are expecting. Everything will happen when it’s supposed to happen. Some ways to form a bond with your baby include having your child sleep with you at night or wearing them in a sling, keeping them close to you. Bonding is a very personal and intimate thing.

Transcript:

- Every woman is different. Some women are screaming while they're pushing. Some women breathe their baby out. Some people fall apart. Some people are excited. The fact is that bonding is a very personal and intimate thing. Some of us fell in love the first time we saw our husband. Some of us are still trying to figure out how to love him. The same thing happens with a baby. You ... Read more

don't sometimes bond right away and that is okay. You have to be very careful, I tell my clients, not to think that you should be feeling a certain way, or the way that you think other people expect you. Just trust to you know, that you will fall in love with this baby. That everything will actually happen the way it's supposed to happen, not the way some expert told you that it should happen. Bonding with your baby is one of the most important things from birth to maybe age three or five. It's very important that your child have a sense of you to feel secure and safe during those important, formative years and beyond. Some of the ways that you can bond with your baby is co-sleeping, having your child sleep with you at night. Wearing your baby in a sling or one of those things that keeps them tight to your body at all times. A newborn really needs its mother. It needs to remain attached to its mother. They are a single biological unit where the mother is regulating the infant in many, many ways. Respiration, heartbeat, and so my message to parents is don't let them take your baby away. Classically, certainly for me it was like, We'll just take him to the nursery so you can get a good night's sleep, and, very often, what happens is that separation is the final endpoint in a series of subtle separations that start early on in pregnancy with the ultrasound photograph where we're getting separated from our own inner sense of what's going on inside us. Where we need to look at it on a screen. I really say, keep your baby with you. It facilitates all kinds of things including that baby's well being.