How to detect birth strain in your baby
Understanding and Nurturing Your Newborn: A Guide for Parents who suspect birth strain in their baby
Introduction:
Feeling overwhelmed with a crying baby, a chaotic house, and disrupted meals is a shared experience among many new parents. Caring for a newborn comes with its challenges, and deciphering the reasons behind incessant crying can be a struggle. This is where Gayle Palmer’s 35+ years of experience and expertise comes to the fore.
The Transition to the Outside World:
Babies communicate through crying, it’s their primary means of expression. The transition from the warmth of the womb to the sensory-rich external environment poses challenges. Factors like birth strains, foetal distress, or a lack of contact between mother and baby during labor can impact this transition, leading to issues like sleeping, feeding, and digestive problems.
Checking for birth trauma
Sleeping Difficulties:
Ideally, babies should sleep 16 to 18 hours a day. If your baby struggles to settle, appears overtired, startles easily, or has difficulty sleeping with normal household noise, it might be related to birth strains, foetal distress, or digestive discomfort.
Recommendations:
Ensure a dark, quiet sleeping environment.
Provide love, care, and reassurance.
Avoid excessive carrying, all-night lying, or unnecessary diaper changes.
Limit stimuli from friends and family to prevent overstimulation.
Feeding and Digestive Problems:
Digestive discomfort, affecting infants up to 3 to 4 months, can result from various factors such as birth strains, stress, lactose intolerance, allergy, or genetics. Recognizing it involves observing frequent and a frequent symptom is prolonged crying, difficulty soothing. The peak in symptoms is between 6-8 weeks and especially in the evenings.
Recommendations:
Stay calm to create a calming atmosphere for the baby. Actively lower your heart rate when holding your baby when it is distressed really helps.
Attend to the baby’s cries promptly; consider using a pacifier/ dummy.
Ensure Mum, if breastfeeding, has eaten well in the early evening – no food in – poor quality milk out. Ask Gayle what you can do to help the nutrition going in during this period and what supplements are particularly recommended.
Explore a low-allergen diet, particularly if breastfeeding. Speak to Gayle as this can be specialist.
Formula-fed babies may benefit from allergen-free formula prescribed by a GP.
Reflux:
Osteopaths suggest that birth-related strains affect the diaphragm, influencing the sphincter between the oesophagus and stomach, leading to reflux – eg persistent vomiting some time after normal burping would occur accompanied by plenty of crying, leg kicking etc
Signs of Reflux:
Regurgitation during or after a feed.
Occasional regurgitation is normal (possetting), but persistent vomiting, projectile vomiting, weight issues, or
lack of weight gain require attention.
Possible Causes and Solutions:
Overfeeding, common in bottle-fed babies (! this may surprise you) with inappropriate teat size.
Allergy indicators: family history, rash, cradle cap, excess mucous, and dry skin patches.
Keeping the baby upright after feeding and burping regularly can help.
Changing the feeding position and posture eg hold the baby in a different way
Gayle Palmer will advise on ALL of these options and reasons and more
Conclusion:
Cranial osteopathy is often recommended, with many parents reporting significant improvements in their baby’s symptoms after just one or a few treatments. If you have any questions or need further information, feel free to reach out. I am here to help you!
To Make an appointment – just use this booking link HERE.
It is highly recommended that BOTH Mum and Baby have a consultation – as a double appointment initially. The reason is that they have gone through a nearly “mirror-image” experience – and as they rely on proper functioning on each other – it makes a big difference.
© Gayle Palmer D.O. Registered Osteopath Living Elements Clinic 2023
