parenting - Stockport Birth Services

15 Ways To Boost Oxytocin In Labour

Oxytocin is produced naturally in your body during birth where it helps to stimulate and strengthen contractions. These contractions help to push your baby down the birth canal and into the world. Although it’s produced naturally and in increasing quantities in labour, are things that you can go to help promote the production of the hormone in your body.

15 Ways To Boost Oxytocin in Labour

Gentle touch and massage can help to stimulate the release of oxytocin, reducing stress and promoting a sense of wellbeing. Massage can also relieve sore muscles of tension. There’s also research that shows that oxytocin rises in the person giving the massage, which is a great way to promote calmness in your birth partner.
A warm bath or shower can reduce stress hormones and enhance oxytocin production.
Deep breathing can turn off the sympathetic nervous system’s stress response, allowing oxytocin to relax your muscles and calm you down.
Having an emotional support person who’s there solely to focus on you rather than anything medical, such as a partner, doula, or close friend, can help to enhance oxytocin production and reduce stress during birth.
Cuddles! Research shows that oxytocin starts to be produced 20 seconds after a cuddle starts, so some lovely long hugs are bound to help your oxytocin levels.
And on the subject of intimacy…orgasms produce oxytocin too. Just make sure you’re somewhere private first!
Nipple stimulation triggers the release of oxytocin, whether this is from your own hands or your partner’s.
Laughter – it really is the best medicine!
Essential oils and other smells that trigger feelings of love and happiness can boost your body’s production of oxytocin.
Music has been found to boost oxytocin levels, so crank your labour playlist up! Some people like to have a calm playlist and a more upbeat one – as long as it’s music that you enjoy do whatever suits you best.
Start eating dates; it seems that the fruit influences oxytocin receptors and stimulates the muscles to respond to your body’s oxytocin.
Creating a peaceful, supportive, and nurturing environment can help to enhance oxytocin production and promote a positive birth experience.
When you’re stressed you produce stress hormones, inhibiting oxytocin. So if you’re feeling stressy during labour figure out the cause and get rid of it, allowing the oxytocin levels to rise.
Showing love and affection towards your support partner can boost your oxytocin levels; meaningful connection while bringing new life to the world, can there by anything more worthy of the love hormone?
Avoiding unnecessary disturbances can help promote an oxytocin-fuelled environment. If someone’s constantly bringing you out of your hazy dazy birth bubble the oxytocin production will be disrupted – yuck.

Oxytocin is a crucial hormone for the birthing process. It has many benefits including reducing the amount of time your labour lasts, increasing your tolerance to pain, promoting bonding and attachment. By enhancing oxytocin production during labour, you can promote a positive and empowering birth experience, and create a strong foundation for the future.

For more information about oxytocin in birth, head over to Sara Wickham’s page where she looks at some of the evidence.

5 Ways To Parent Your Way Over The Holidays

With the holidays approaching our thoughts are turning to nights in front of the fire with our loved ones, twinkling lights and laughter filling the room, adults sipping mulled wine while the children play excitedly with their new eco-friendly toy which they’re extremely grateful for. Ha! The reality for most of us is Christmas24 on marathon, several arguments a day and plastic beeping toys discarded in favour of wrapping paper. And along with this rather more real family picture if you’re a new parent or one going through a challenging situation you might be feeling anxious over the public parenting you’ll be doing over the season.

In a truth universally acknowledged by every single parent that has ever existed, you will be given unsolicited advice from the moment your pregnancy becomes public knowledge. While this is often easy to ignore when it’s a stranger in your local supermarket telling you to start giving rusks to your 3 week old, it’s a lot more difficult when it comes from somebody you love and whose heart you know is in the right place. Dealing with the ‘helpful’ advice can be difficult enough but the added anxiety that can build in anticipation of the interference can set even the most confident parent’s nerves on edge. So here’s your guide to navigating the tricky dynamics whilst maintaining your authenticity as a parent and avoiding a family drama that would rival the great GravyGate of 1998™.

Pick your battles

It helps to think ahead and if you don’t want to spend all your time sniping at your Great Aunt Beryl then working out in advance what you’re willing to let slide is a great tool. Knowing that you’ll allow the sugar content to rise but bedtimes will remain steadfastly the same, or that you’ll let your minimum two vegetables per meal requirement go but you won’t enter into any discussion about how yes you’re still breastfeeding your 8 month old and have no plans to stop thank you very much will do wonders for your mental health. Pre-planning the areas that you’ll concede will keep your blood pressure stable and has the added bonus of allowing people to think they’re getting their own way, at least sometimes.

Enlist an ally

A problem shared is a problem relative that doesn’t get both barrels over the turkey for pushing you right over the brink. Having someone who can step in to distract and deflect a conversation or who can reaffirm your stance is invaluable. This ally might not be who you’d expect; look for someone who allows what’s happening to wash over them – a genial personality or a predilection for gin is ideal.

Have an escape plan

Sometimes biting your tongue proves too much and you just need space before you explode. Whether you conjure up a forgotten item that’s desperately needed from a shop at least 45 minutes away, a catch-up with a friend who you only have one more opportunity to see before they leave for Timbukto, or a child who suddenly and unexplainably will only have their nap while being driven round the outskirts of your town, some time on your own away from the source of contention will do you wonders. Plus you’ll get to scroll through Facebook and eat rustled After Eights without interruption.

Practice your defence

Freedom of speech might exist but that doesn’t put you under any obligation to listen, let alone act, on what’s being said. Especially if that advice goes against your principles or is so old-fashioned it’s downright dangerous. Unfortunately much advice that’s given to parents by well-meaning individuals comes from what they did when they were raising their young folk; early weaning, dipping dummies in anything let alone whisky, leaving them to cry, feeding them on a four-hourly schedule, creating a rod for your own back are all things older generations like to trot out and are all things which are unequivocally, backed-up-by-science wrong. If a dignified silence is too much to ask have a couple of stock phrases that you can resort to. “Thanks for the advice, that doesn’t work for us”, “We’ve researched our methods and this is what we believe is right for our family”, “We don’t believe that’s going to work for us” all work and the slightly ruder but definitely final word is “You’re not the parent so butt out, buttinski”. Practice makes perfect!

If all else fails, remember you are your child’s advocate.

Often when we attend family gatherings we revert back to the dynamics that existed in our own childhoods, making it hard to speak up or against the adultier adult. But your child knows only you as the ultimate authority in their life and sometimes that must give us the strength to act in their best interests. That could mean speaking loudly and insistently that yes even a little bit of milk will hurt your CMPA child, or stepping in when Granny insists that your unwilling child simply must kiss her goodbye when you’re trying to teach the concept of consent from an early age. Some things transcend politeness and will help shape your child’s identity so let this give you strength when dealing with tricky situations.

Time with family is the greatest gift over the holiday season, along with liebkuchen and pigs in blankets, but it’s rarely as idyllic as our favourite Christmas films would have us believe. Stay calm, prepare in advance and if all else fails dive right into the bottle of Irish cream lurking at the back of the cupboard. Good luck!

If You Only Read Some Breastfeeding Articles, Make Them These

I know that statistically most of you reading this while pregnant will want to breastfeed. And I know that most of you won’t reach your goals. That’s what the evidence says. Bizarrely, the research also tells us that antenatal breastfeeding education doesn’t help women fulfil their goals. But I see and hear women every day say “Why did nobody tell me…” about some aspect of breastfeeding or another, which is why the new Stockport Birth Services antenatal course programme includes a breastfeeding session. And even then I won’t have been able to say everything I want to.

I can’t overstate that for some women breastfeeding is hard. I don’t want to put you off, but there’s this idea out there that because breastfeeding is ‘natural’ it’s easy. Nothing could be further than the truth! Remember when you learned to walk? (Well, no, not unless you have hyperthymesia). But trust me – you fell down, got up, fell down, got up, fell down, got up then eventually cracked it and didn’t fall over again until you became a student and cracked open the White Lightening. So if you feel like you’re struggling and ‘failing’ then take heart – many of us have been there and there’s help available. If you can’t get to a group, or you’re not local this is a rather fab Facebook group who I see give excellent information (generally I’d say be careful of where you get your info from online as you don’t know their creds, but on this occasion you can trust the source)

First we need to unpick some of the misinformation out there. Yes your baby needs feeding again. Yes you are making enough milk. Yes it is normal. No your baby doesn’t need to wait 4 hours between feeds. No you don’t need to time a feed from one side for 20 minutes. This is one of the most important blogs you’ll read about breastfeeding and the obsession over the infant feeding intervals. Followed by this one about how long to feed for. I’ll also direct you here to here we question the idea of a ‘good baby‘ and how the idea of it is complicit in damaging the breastfeeding relationship.

However you feed your baby, responsive feeding is the key and all parents should be helped to understand what that means.

As a final note here, sometimes feeding worries continue through to the time to wean your baby onto solid food, and sometimes this comes from the mistaken belief that it will help you get some much-needed extra sleep. Here’s a look into it.

There’s literally thousands of blogs I could point you towards on this subject, but these are my favourites.