Some psychology professionals say that birth is one of the events that can most mark a person's personality, and I guess they say it because we have always treated quite badly to babies at birth.
Run a video on Facebook in which a nurse is bathing a newborn that shows that many things still have to be changed in the treatment and care of newborns and that the most recommended, since the baby is yours, is that when he is born, it is you who bathes him (or it could happen to this that I show in the video):
"Bath time!"
It is not seen in the video, but this is how I imagine this scene. The baby is sleeping peacefully in his crib, or in the arms of his parents, and the nurse arrives to say "Bath time!", Because look, at that moment he has decided that it is time to bathe the baby in room 12. Well I could have told the parents "let me know when I am awake and calm", but no, it doesn't matter, it is at that moment when you have time to do it and the rest is left over.
The father says that if he can accompany him, he would like to videotape the first bath of his baby, and the nurse agrees. And then the following happens:
Sadly, this happens over and over again in many hospitals ... The nursery staff has frequently lost the delicacy and respect towards newcomers who are facing a thousand and one adaptations ...
Posted by Born in Fullness - Natural Birth on Friday, December 5, 2014
In the end they dress him and take him back to the room, where his mother asks "How are you doing?", To which the father responds the same as the nurse has said: "Oops, what character does our son ... the nurse has already told me that it will be weapons to take ".
But no, it is not a matter of character, but simply of treating a baby as if we were washing a piece of meat, or the lettuce that we will eat later. And I do not say it for dignity only, because the video is recorded for posterity, but because the baby has been in this world for a few hours, is beginning to know where he is, is learning thousands of things every minute and the last thing he needs is a moment of suffering and agony in which he could be feeling that his life is going away.
But babies cry
Of course babies cry. It is his way of communicating that something is not going well. And we are your caregivers and responsible for providing the necessary care and attention to stop crying. Come on, that one thing is that they cry because they need something and another that they cry because we are doing something they don't like. If we talk about dressing them, when some people cry, because there is no other, you have to put on their clothes because they can lose their temperature and put their health in danger, but no, we are talking about bathing them and, honestly, there are much more caring and affectionate ways of doing it.
For the nurse it is a bath more than the hundreds of baths for babies that she does for a year. For that baby it is his first bath, his first contact with water, and it is not that treatment he deserves or needs.
It makes you want not to be born
Two years ago I shared this video even more explicit in which more maneuvers are seen and from which I drew the following conclusion: makes you want not to be born.
The professionals have no bad intention, not even in the video above, but they also have no tact, no empathy and no love in dealing with children. They are a flower that has just arrived and what they need is a treatment according to their physical and emotional fragility: affection, respect, making them feel safe and loved, and not as if they had just arrived in the jungle (they will have time to discover what we humans are capable of).
In fact, you don't even need to bathe them so quickly
We are talking about the fact that the newborn's bath should be done with more affection, but that debate currently does not even make sense, because there is no reason to recommend that the baby should receive a bath at birth, beyond the reasons aesthetic (that is handsome or beautiful).
That is to say, bathing the baby does not bring any benefit and instead some damage: its thermal stability is put at risk, because when we wet it we will cool it, and we are unnecessarily separating it from its mother, at a time when it is more important that they are together, they smell, they know each other , are in contact skin to skin, the baby is taken to the chest, etc.
In the Clinical Practice Guideline on the Care of Normal Childbirth in Spain, the section dedicated to the baby's bath concludes the following:
It is recommended not to routinely bathe the RN in the first hours after birth. If the mother requested it, the bath would be an acceptable option as long as the thermal stability of the newborn was achieved and without interfering with the recommended skin-to-skin contact time.
And when do you bathe then?
Well, as I said at the beginning, at some point in the day it is born, or the next day, or the next. Does not matter. At a time when the baby is calm and the mother and father want to bathe him. And the ideal is that they do, their parents. Because he is his son, because if they do not know they have to learn, and because it is advisable for their confidence when caring for the baby, to feel increasingly capable.
In the hospital where my children were born, the children were taken to bathe them, at least they did when the third was born, and my wife made it clear: "I bathe my son, for that I am his mother." While they were taking the babies of other mothers (as we have allowed many new parents), she said not to speak, that they did not separate him from her for that reason. And when they came to take him it was already late. She had already bathed him.
Another way to do it
If the nurse insists on bathing, we can deny, of course, that the baby is ours, but if it is the parents who want to be bathed because it is a clean priority for us, we should know that there is another way to do it. A nurse became famous a few years ago by demonstrating that she could put babies under the tap and make them feel calm, confident and well treated:
Now compare this to the first and second videos. Babies seem to live it in a somewhat different way, right?
Video | Facebook
Photo | iStock
In Babies and more | Give birth with respect: video about what should not happen in childbirth, obstetric violence, gender violence, how the relationship between professionals and women influences the birth process
