The Breast Crawl
When placed on their mother’s abdomen, healthy newborns will find their way to their mother’s breasts. It’s based in mammalian neurophysiology, meaning that all mammals have this innate behavior pattern. Check out the crawl in this video from Global Health Media: (Click here for the original post on their website)
It’s quite amazing the way the breast crawl explains so much! It puts together pieces that I didn’t even realize were disjointed in my mind until I researched this more. For example— newborn reflexes and why they exist. Or why my babies would startle themselves awake whenever they would “fall off the boob” when I would feed them in a cradle position, but they would sleep more content for much longer if I was reclined back and they were sleeping on their bellies on mine.
There are numerous reflexes a newborn is born with that are assessed upon birth and through infancy to ensure the newborn is “neurologically intact.” But they all serve purposes! The stepping reflex is more than just a cute response to elicit, it helps the newborn push up the mother’s abdomen as s/he makes her/his way to the breasts (and the motion simultaneously is massaging the muscular uterus that just contracted and expelled out the newborn and accompanying placenta, and needs to continue to contract in order to stop the bleeding associated with birth). The rooting reflex encourages the newborn to continue searching for the nipple until contact occurs. And then the sucking reflex! When the nipple contacts the palate, the infant reflexively begins suckling. These newborn reflexes are present for several weeks and eventually extinguish at varying rates.
Baby B, January 2020
Nine stages of the breast crawl have been described by Widstrom et al.
1: Birth cry
2: Relaxation
3: Awakening
4: Activity
5: Rest
6: Crawling/sliding
7: Familiarization
8: Suckling
9: Sleeping
Watch the crawl again, looking for these nine distinct stages.
Because these newborn reflexes are present for several weeks, they can be tapped into during the first few weeks following birth. So the take away for me as a provider? If I have a dyad with issues latching, as part of initial troubleshooting I try to tap into some of these reflexes, get parents into a comfortable reclined back position, and get babies on their bellies to allow some natural behaviors to occur.
