The Newborn Baby

The First Days of Life

Birth feels like the climax to long months of waiting, but it is not really a climax at all. You were not waiting to give birth, you were waiting to have a baby. Your labor has produced that baby and there is no rest between the amazing business of becoming parents and the job of being them. Don’t expect too much of yourselves during these first, peculiar days. All three of you have a tremendous amount of adapting to do. The feelings and behavior of today have very little to do with next month because by then all three of you will have changed. Your baby will have settled into life outside the womb, and you will both have settled into parenthood.

Most couples remember this as an intensely emotional and confusing time. Everything is felt too much: stitches and pleasure, responsibility and pride, selfishness and selflessness. You are still desperately tired. Your hormone balance is disturbed, your milk is not fully in, your cervix not yet closed, your body striving for equilibrium. Your partner has no direct physical effects but he has an emotional tightrope to walk. He has to concede to you the prime role as the one who labored yet he has to make you feel that this is the child of you both, that he too is deeply involved. If he pays too much attention to the baby, he risks making you feel that you are no longer his central person. If he concentrates on you he risks the charge that he does not care for his newborn. Many men remark wryly that during these first days after birth there is no way that they can get it right.

As for the baby, what he has to cope with is without parallel in human experience. While he was inside you, your body took care of his. It provided his food and his oxygen, took away his waste products, kept him warmly cushioned and protected, held the world at bay. Now that he is separated from you, his body must take care of itself. He must suck and swallow food and water, digest it and excrete its wastes. He must use energy from that food to keep his body functions running, to keep himself warm and to go on growing. He must breathe to get oxygen and keep his air passages clear with coughs and sneezes. While accepting all these new duties the baby must also cope with a positive bombardment of stimuli as the world rushes in on him. Suddenly there is air on his skin, there is warmth and coolness, there are textures, movements and restrictions. There is light and darkness and there are things to see, coming into focus and blurring out again. There is hunger and emptiness, sucking, fullness and burping. There are sounds and smells and tastes. Everything is new. Everything is different. All is bewilderment.

Your newborn baby’s behavior is a series of reactions to what he perceives as random stimuli. He has instincts and reflexes and working senses but he has no knowledge and no experience. He is programmed for survival but he knows nothing. While he remains a newborn, rather than a baby who has settled into life outside the womb, his behavior will be random and unpredictable. He may cry for food every half hour for six hours and then sleep without any for another six hours. The morning’s “hunger” does not predict the afternoon’s because his hunger has no pattern or shape as yet. His digestion has not settled; hunger signals have not taken on a clear and recognizable form for him. He simply reacts to momentary feelings. His sleep is similarly formless. He may cry, too, for no reason that you can discover and stop as suddenly and inexplicably as he began. His crying has few definite patterns of cause and effect because, apart from physical pain, he has not yet discovered how to differentiate between pleasure and displeasure.

When you start looking after this small, new human being, you lack that first essential for watchful care: baselines. The baby is brand new. However much you know about babies in general, neither you nor anyone else knows anything about this one in particular. You do not know how he looks and behaves when he is well and happy so it is difficult for you to know when he is ill or miserable. You do not know how much he “usually” cries because he has not been around for long enough for anything to be usual. You do not know how much he usually eats or sleeps so you cannot judge whether today’s feeding or sleeping is adequate or excessive. Yet his wellbeing is in your hands. Even without baselines of usual behavior against which to judge, you have to make continual assessments and adjustments while you learn your baby and he learns life. There is a lot of learning for all of you. It may take only a week after his birth for you to feel secure in your caring and for him to feel secure in his world. But it may take a month. You have to know the basic essentials. Once you and he have learned them, established your baselines, got to know each other, everything will suddenly seem much easier and smoother for all of you. You will be dealing with a baby person rather than a newborn.

During these first days, don’t torment yourselves if you do not feel anything for the baby that you can recognize as love. When parents first meet a baby, seconds after birth, recognition can reverberate between them so that all the waiting and the wanting culminate not just in a baby but in this baby, who seems to come out of the mother’s womb and into her arms and heart in a single move. People call this “bonding” and it has been so idealized in recent years that parents to whom it does not happen sometimes fear a basic lack in their relationship with their babies from the very beginning. Remember that “bonding” has not been emphasized as an exhortation to parents but to delivery-room staff, who should not get between the post-natal threesome for a bustle of routine care until there have been time and opportunity for them all to greet each other. That opportunity is important but instant bonding is not. If it did not happen to you remember that previous generations of women seldom held their new babies until they had been washed and weighed and dressed, and that many mothers were anesthetized at the time of delivery so that their first meeting with their babies had to wait until they were awake and aware. There was no failure of love between these women and their babies, and it is absurd to think that your relationship with your baby might falter or fail because no lightning-bolt bonded you together on the delivery table.

Love will come but it may take time. However you define the word it must have something to do with interaction between people who know each other, who like what they know and want to know more. If there is love, there must be a sharing, a giving and taking of affection and support. A brand new baby is neither lovable nor loving. He is not truly lovable because he has not yet got himself into predictable, knowable shape nor had time to produce the characteristics which will make it clear for evermore that he is a unique person. You may love him on sight because he is your baby; the fulfilment, perhaps, of a plan or a dream; but you cannot instantly love him as one person loves another; he is not fully a person until he is settled. He is not loving because he does not yet know of his own existence, let alone yours. He will learn to love you with a determined and unshakeable passion unequalled in human relationships. But it will take time.

The mixed feellings you have toward your baby now are neither a guide for the present nor a warning for the future. The overwhelming tenderness that sweeps over you as you cradle his heavy, downy head can give way in a moment to furious irritation at his crying. Your pride in being a parent can be swamped in claustrophobia as you realize that you are committed to him forever and will never again be free to be an entirely separate individual person. If you can let it, your body will start loving the baby for you even before he is properly a person. Reveling in the baby physically speeds up the time when he can join in this essential business of loving. He will not lie passively, leaving it to you to make all the advances. If you will have him close, he will make advances to you, too. He has a built-in interest in you because you are essential to his survival. He will see to it that love comes.

Your body’s commands and your baby’s physical reactions are your best guide to handling him in these very first days. Child-rearing plans and policies are no use to you yet. Plans and policies can only be judged by the consistent responses they evoke and nothing you can work out will get consistency from an unsettled newborn.

The baby needs to be handled so that his new life seems as little different as possible from life in your womb. His needs are simple, repetitive and immediate. He needs food and water in the combined form of milk; he needs warmth and comfort from cuddling arms and soft wrappings in a small, safe bed; he needs just enough cleanliness to keep his skin from getting sore and he needs protection. That is all he needs. The baths and changing mats, powders and lotions, brushes and booties that tempt you in every baby shop will be fun for you to buy and nice for him later. But for now he is a bundle and he should be a bundle. Wrap him warmly, hold him closely, handle him slowly, feed him when he is hungry, talk to him when he looks at you, wash him when he is dirty and give him peaceful time to come to terms with life. Peaceful contentment means that you have got it right. Distress means that you got it wrong. Let his reactions guide you.

If you can manage this, the baby will gradually come to realize what he needs and to realize that he gets what he needs when he needs it. By the time he is a settled, knowable, lovable small person, he will know the world to be a good place to alive in. And that, after all, is the best start you can possibly give him.