Are We Bonding Yet?

By Vicki Elson, MA, CCE, CD www.birth-media.com Feel free to make copies and share with credit!

Labor pain comes with a gift: the “cocktail of love hormones,” described by Dr. Michel Odent, includes oxytocin, the hormone of labor, lactation, and love, plus an endorphin rush that helps us deal with pain and also gives us a natural high.  It’s like the famous “runner’s high,” that moment after an athlete feels like they’ve “hit the wall,” and then suddenly they’ve got endless energy and they feel wonderful. If we were full of labor endorphins right now, we’d be having such a party.

When the pain of labor stops, the hormones are still there, and we mothers are in the ideal physiological state for falling in love with our newborns.  This bodes well for the continuation of the species.

Not everybody experiences this, but that’s okay.  When my grandpa’s ewes failed to bond well with their new lambs, he had to put them on leashes so they’d stand still and let the babies nurse.  Humans are different.  We can adopt a teenager and bond just as well as if we’d birthed the kid ourselves.  If a mama doesn’t feel an immediate so-in-love feeling with her newborn, she will soon.

Bonding happens through all of our senses, including our sense of smell.  A new baby’s smell is like nectar.  Some parents secretly confess to smelling their kids while they’re sleeping, but it’s not really such a secret — the pleasure in that is a universal human experience.  And our sense of touch is an essential ingredient too.  New research is showing the profound value of skin-to-skin contact at the moment of birth for both mother and baby.  Breastfed babies benefit from enhanced bonding, and their poop smells a whole lot better too.

Dr. Odent notes that love hormones are dampened by labor drugs and anesthesia, and these interventions can also make babies less responsive at birth.  While we can overcome anything on the road to fully loving our children, we have to wonder about the effects of a 75% epidural rate and a 33% cesarean rate on a generation of mothers and babies.

To support optimal bonding, it helps to avoid drugs and surgery unless they’re truly necessary, to make birth a loving event well-supported by friends, family, and/or a doula, to enjoy the miracle of skin-to-skin hugging when that warm, wet, slippery, alive little person first emerges into our hands, and to breastfeed our babies.

Vicki Elson’s film, “Laboring Under An Illusion: Mass Media Childbirth vs. The Real Thing,” features TV character Murphy Brown having a hilarious but less-than-empowered birth.  In a scene that didn’t make it into the film, she’s feeling very unsure about being a good enough mom when at last she is alone with her new baby.  Self-consciously she asks, “Are we bonding yet?”  But soon, she is singing “You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman,” and we know that she is starting to fall in love.  www.birth-media.com