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Join us today with Trish Ware, a labor and delivery nurse of 17 years to explain the five most important things to know before labor! 

Over the past 17 years, Trish has developed a reputation for making laboring mamas feel empowered and confident — even if she’s not in the labor room with them. She has spent many years analyzing the literature & her own experiences in the labor room to prepare and educate mothers for a confident labor! Here are 

1. Mindset:

• Remove fixed expectations: When women have trauma from previous birth experiences, it is sometimes hard to let go of that. 
• Embrace the entropy: Labor rarely goes as planned, so getting comfortable with the potential paths that can unfold is extremely important!
• Prepare: Being educated on what’s happening to your body is important so you can make informed decisions during labor. 

2. Advocacy boosts confidence:

• Decide on a specific person (nurse, another mom, a doula, midwife), to ask questions when you’re beginning to feel uncertain. 
• If you have a question or something in your body feels off, don't be afraid to talk to your provider about it. You are not meant to do this alone, and your body often knows best! 

3. Stay at home as long as possible:

• Stick to intuition and stay at home until contractions are less than four minutes apart for at least two hours. This is key for environmental control and less interventions.
• At home you can dim the lights to boost melatonin, which will help make your pain threshold higher!

4. Start with 1000 minutes uninterrupted skin-to-skin:

• As long as complications don’t occur, holding your baby for the first 1000 minutes of their lives is vital for their neurological and microbiome development.
• Skin contact, even with another family member, builds an immediate connection and gives your newborn a sense of safety after coming into the world.

5. Less interventions:

• Allowing yourself to move around freely, such as using a yoga ball to help open your hips, will also prevent the need for additional interventions if you arrive to the hospital early and are confined to a bed. 
• Your baby’s weight isn’t going to change within a matter of minutes, so it is okay to know that you’re allowed to ask for that first 1000 minutes with your baby and wait to bathe and weigh. 

If you need help finding a birth advocate, or want access to the mindset challenge- check out Master your Childbirth Mindset, a five day interactive challenge that will change the way you view labor & birth!  

To watch, visit our Youtube, and to listen, visit our podcast!

During residency, Dr. Shrestha witnessed infant malnutrition and the introduction of solid foods at two months of age. He began seeing the relationship of this practice to long term negative health outcomes and became passionate about educating his patients, who often could not afford the resulting follow on care, on the preventative benefits of breastfeeding...

About a year ago, when conducting ‘Barriers to Breastfeeding’ research across the United States, I became intrigued by The Global Breastfeeding Scorecard statistics, demonstrating that Nepal was the most successful country in the world to support women in the WHO recommendation of breastfeeding for two years. Initially, I hypothesized that these rates were likely correlated to Gross Domestic Profit (GDP), with the poorest nations perhaps having increased breastfeeding rates out of necessity: lack of access to formula or bottles.

 

This did not seem to be the case with Nepal, as their success rates supersede countries with far lower GDP. According to Dr. Prakash Sunder Shrestha, President of the Nepal Breastfeeding Promotion Forum, “The persistent failure of governments to invest significantly in breastfeeding is hard to comprehend. Many thousands of babies die each year because they did not enjoy the benefit of breastfeeding and multiple thousands more grow up deprived of the many wonders of this special gift of god of nature and of the mother.”

 

After coming across the staggering result of over thirty years of Dr. Shrestha’s career and dedication to improving the health of his community through breastfeeding, I wanted to meet him for myself and discover what breastfeeding success secrets Nepal beheld.  A year passed of attempting to contact him. Then in August 2019, the Outlook inbox sound binged like pick striking gold: the correct email had been reached and Dr. Shrestha wanted to meet for an interview!

Less than a month later, I packed up my life into one (overly stuffed luggage) and hopped on a flight with this goal: to understand what Nepal is doing differently from the rest of the world to promote breastfeeding and optimizing future generation wellness and disseminate that with our markets globally.

 

Fast forward to Dullakel Pediatric Hospital. It’s a humid, smoky, festival day and the resulting traffic rendered me wandering into the lobby a standard ten minutes late asking random Doctors where I could find Dr. Shrestha’s office for ‘breastfeeding research’ (come to find out, this rendered me the funny local nickname 'Breastfeeding!') but sooner or later, I found Dr. Shrestha mid an opportunistic medical student lecture, true to his passion for preventative education.

He spent the next two hours in what was the most surprising interview of this journey yet. I was expecting him to excitedly uncover all of these tips and tricks he deems as responsible for the success rates of his country- but found a rather jaded opinion of how much better Nepal could be doing in supporting women along their breastfeeding journey.

 

It was an odd dynamic, myself and this Nepalese doctor at the end of his career spent sharing the same cause and resonating in the same frustration. He began his medical career in Calcutta, India. During residency, he witnessed infant malnutrition and the introduction of solid foods at two months of age. He began seeing the relationship of this practice to long term negative health outcomes and became passionate about educating his patients, who often could not afford the resulting follow on care, on the preventative benefits of breastfeeding. To read my interview with Dr. Shrestha on our other blog post here.

 

To find out more about what is being done differently in the hospital setting, I traveled to Propokar Maternity Hospital, where there is an average of 15,000 babies born every month. More clinical interviews here confirm the result of Dr. Shrestha's impact on Nepal’s success statistics. One NICU nurse, Rama, explains policy prohibits the use of bottles in hospital. The reason? The exact primary barrier to breastfeeding that we uncovered in the/U.S. exists here: nipple confusion.

 

This realization surprised me. If anything, I was expecting the bottle nipples here to be better matched to mom’s shape, feel, and flow. “What happens if a mom cannot be with her baby?” I asked.

 

“Breastfeeding is the expected and culturally supported norm. If a mom is critically ill, we use this little spoon to slowly drip her pumped breastmilk into the infant’s mouth.”

 

Shocked, yet impressed with the clinical dedication to prevent nipple confusion, I discussed these findings with Dr. Shrestha, as they did not seem feasible to immediately implement in Western hospital systems where time and cost savings drive care. Ultimately, our time together resulted in the unified view of the solution to the hospitals and community that can sanitize products: a better bottle nipple.  

 

Here is the synopsis of that discussion: We agreed that companies have the positioning power to make a difference and that currently, formula marketing plays on the fear that mom can’t produce enough milk- causing early introduction of bottles. What Dr. Sundrath described next shocked me once again. He confirmed what Nurse Rama had told me, describing what they also call ‘Nipple Confusion’. I shared with him our findings from U.S. surveys and explained we have the same problem, especially when moms need to introduce a product after going back to work in three months. “You have the right point. Nepal is increasing maternal leave to 14 weeks- but how can we expect exclusive breastfeeding when moms have to go back to work after that?” 

After realizing Nepal faces the same challenges with current bottles on the market, yet has done a good job bolstering cultural support and hospital protocol that prevents introducing a product at all, I spilled my thought process behind The Natural Nipple.

 

“Why not have industry take the lead in driving the policy change that promotes breastfeeding, rather than presenting, up until now, the primary barrier against it?” I asked. “There are few people like you and me in this world,” replied Dr. Shrestha. “Formula companies have the funding to buy policy change by putting their curriculum now at the medical education level and spend millions of dollars on advertising why moms need it. It’s the human right of the baby to have breastmilk.” 

 

“I agree, it’s not scientific marketing, but if this is how the consumer and future key stakeholders are digesting information why not fight fire with fire? In the 30 years that you’ve been trying, the policy still hasn’t changed to the degree that you hoped would support breastfeeding families.”

 

This is why I’m passionate about what we can control and I think it’s important for people who are driving the industry to begin making a difference. To do that you have to be passionate about the cause. Why not be the first bottle company that comes out of a clinical and research background, with the specific purpose to empower breastfeeding, promote bonding, and optimize wellness worldwide?

*coming soon*

Its millennials turn to have babies, and they are a group that is armed with information and their own vision of how they want their birth experience to be. But are the doctors and nurses from the previous generations ready for them? Millennial mom, Aneesah, had an intense experience not only because her birth did not go as expected, but also because of the unforeseen tension between her and the hospital staff.