Your Baby Skin to Skin

As a doula, and lactation counselor that has set in through many hours of instruction and read countless texts, I can only praise the comprehensive resource that Fitz-Desorgher has created. She not only discusses the medical findings behind her reasoning but discusses different strategies and techniques for a variety of situations that a parent or caregiver is bound to encounter.

This is a nice book to give as a present to a first time mom. It can also be given in clinics to the expectant mothers. The author is an experience midwife, who describes the importance of tactile development from birth until one-year-old milestone. She described everything as needed: the importance of first contact, the feeding (breast and bottle), the development of autonomic nervous system, sleeping, moving and talking. Overall, a nice and informative book.

I have nursed multiple babies and this is the best book I have read so far. Now, I don't entirely agree with it, but its about as back to basics as I have seen. I would definitely promote this book to pregnant or new moms, especially with their first child. I do disagree with the part about food not affecting the milk, but other than that this book was spot on in my experience.

Thank you NetGalley for a free copy of this novel in exchange for a fair review.

Your Baby Skin to Skin gives parents a fresh, empowering approach to parenting. It takes parents on a reassuring and practical journey through your baby’s first year. You are invited to contemplate your baby from a different perspective from the usual. One which can bring calm and solace along with many "lightbulb moments" of recognition. This book has at its heart the delightful truth that your baby is a highly evolved human, pre-set instinctively to survive. You can simply step back and let your baby show you how to parent by understanding the inbuilt reflexes and instinctive cues. Instincts are not learned, need no practice and can never be wrong. After all, no-one taught us to sneeze, we can't get better at sneezing through practice and we can't sneeze "wrong"! Likewise, a newborn baby comes ready-primed to feed, sleep and learn perfectly well and cannot get these things wrong, so turn down your anxiety and learn from your little instinctive expert. By stepping back, accepting that your baby really can't get the business of being a baby wrong, you can finally rid yourself of the need to teach your newborn the basics of life. Parenting can be about watching evolution unfold before your eyes, safe in the knowledge that there are millions of years of natural selection wrapped up in your child and you ensuring that both of you will respond to each other naturally and correctly. Millions of years of evolution have got us here safely and now you can relax and get to know your baby.

That's a long synopsis! I usually include them in all my book reviews so that if you haven't heard of the book or aren't familiar with the topic you have a bit of a background on what the book is about. So I have been reading a lot of pregnancy and parenting books as we prepare to start our own family and I really loved this one. Although I do not yet have children, between my background in Anthropology and our choice to live a natural lifestyle, I am a big fan of what people now call "primal child-rearing" aka what women have been doing for thousand of years until it became inconvenient to them and they began changing things to accommodate their lifestyle and not what was best for the baby. No judgement to anyone's parenting style, just my opinion from what I learned in college and all the reading/research I have been doing since.

This book is broken down into 12 chapters starting from your baby coming into this through baby's first year. The first chapter talks about the importance of vaginal birth, crowning and the immediate skin to skin of baby and mama. The following chapters talks about things such as keeping baby close to you while sleeping, safe co-sleeping, breastfeeding, trusting your primitive instincts, development during the first year and many other important topics. I really liked this book because it includes a great deal of information and research that I hope will help new mamas and mamas-to-be to understand that all of these things are what is best for baby. Overall, I thought it was a very well written book that contains a lot of important information that is written that is easy to read. Thank you to the publisher for sending me an ARC of this book.

A really interesting and useful read. It goes into lots of detail and includes the actual birthing process. I really wish this book had been available while I was pregnant! The author has so much experience and I really felt secure in what I was reading. She explains why we do skin to skin, co-sleeping, feeding, the baby's general health and the mums. As the author is a midwife, there is a lot of information regarding the anatomy of the baby which I found really useful as none of the other baby books i've read have gone into this detail, for example the belly button and what happens to the cord stump. A great easy and informative read which I will be buying in hard copy for my bookshelf.

I'm not a mom, I'm not a wife, and I'm not pregnant so I thought this book will be boring, but I really LOVE it and I will recommend it for all women. It gives me a lot of good and useful information. The writer has worked for 30 years as a midwife, she has a lot of personal experiences in the parent-baby relationship. A truly inspirational book!

Thank you NetGalley for a free copy of this book.