- Myself, my particular interest is the first hour,
the first six hours impacts how we're going to become socially and emotionally intelligent.
This is the essence of my research, the babies that are put skin to skin
are warmer, measurably, by half a degree They have a higher blood sugar.
They have a better return.
They are breathing better, but above all they're awake, they're alive.
That aliveness and awakeness has got an important dimension,
They will open their eyes and connect with mother.
The first thing would be that the baby is born and it must stay with mother.
And it stays with mother on mother's skin .
Mother's skin is different to the skin on the rest of her body,
and is designed to be the place where a baby is born.
And when the baby is born and it comes here and it's warmer, it's two degrees warmer there.
And the baby will get it's warmth from there.
All the mother has to do is just hold her baby, and love her baby.
When baby is born, one of the things that we would want to say to moms and dads
is that this baby knows mom, and mom's smell in the uterus, moms taste in the amniotic fluid.
The sound of mom tells me I'm safe.
Now when I'm born, if mom is there then I know I'm still safe.
When the baby is born, especially if it's premature,
what we will do is to put the baby very tightly in skin to skin contact,
so the baby is like in the uterus almost.
That containment is deep pressure touch.
goes directly to the emotional processing unit of the brain,
and reassures the amygdala that you're safe.
And it's very important to ensure that parents learn quickly they can do this containment touch.
Extremely premature babies will be in the context where
their technology requirements may make it too difficult to do the skin to skin.
The baby may have extensive, major surgery.
The mother may have been herself so sick and so on.
And yes, after weeks of being apart, you just start again, you just catch up.
What you're then doing is optimizing the trajectory.
we can recover some of these steps weeks, and months,
who knows even maybe years later.
The people who this baby should be exposed to
are the ones who are going to be with this baby intimately, emotionally, closely,
for the next two to three years.
I call it part of the attachment environment,
because now the baby learns that this is somebody that I must trust.
The attachment environment can include grandmother,
or anybody who's going to be the committed, constant caregiver.
A primary caregiver is the key thing for the baby's brain, it doesn't have to be mother.
Mother might die, that happens in my country unfortunately, and then another primary caregiver.
The baby will not come to harm from change in primary caregiver.
Can change primary caregiver once or twice even,
but once you start passing the parcel and there's no primary caregiver, primary!
Two years, committed. Babies start to to decompensate.
We need to be having a positive outlook with respect to the fact that
babies who had a very rocky start are not doomed in any way at all.
We should positive, but it can be hard work and it needs a lot of extra inputs.
The earlier those inputs are provided, the better the long-term trajectory.
And so we have occupational therapists, we have speech therapists,
the earlier they can get in to work with supporting whatever deficits,
whatever difficulties, whatever problems are being encountered,
the better the long-term outcome is going to be.