Every birth is unique. It is an amazing, highly personal and yes, perilous journey for you and even more so for baby as he makes the right moves to pass through your hard pelvic bones and down a tight birth canal in order to emerge and awaken for the first time in his life ─ literally.
What does baby feel in those crucial first moments of life?
He gets a shock from the sudden change to say the least.
Here are six drastic adjustments he must instantly undergo to be able to adapt to life outside the womb.
1. He Breathes in Air
For 40 weeks, baby as a developing fetus, was immersed in amniotic fluid and never “breathed” the way we do ─ like take in air through the nose.
Your umbilical cord provided baby with all the oxygen-rich blood he needed in the womb. Early in the first stages of pregnancy, at around five to six weeks, the umbilical cord developed to deliver oxygen and remove carbon dioxide directly to and from the developing fetus’s body through the navel. This means that you breathed in for baby and the oxygen in your blood was then transferred to baby’s blood (which is why it is important not to smoke during pregnancy).
He never used his lungs at all before birth as they were filled with amniotic fluid. However, the lungs did do some “practice” breathing towards the end of the pregnancy in the sense that baby inhaled and exhaled amniotic fluid.
At the moment of birth, however, after an arduous birthing process, baby was suddenly thrust into a very different environment and his entire central nervous system reacted. His umbilical cord stopped pulsating blood and oxygen and was clamped and cut, forcing baby to suck in his first breath of life to inflate his collapsed, fluid-filled lungs, usually at about 10 seconds after delivery. This is the moment when baby, as an independent being, breathes in air on his own and where you will usually hear him cry out loud.
2. He Hears the Sound of his Own Voice
How does baby know how to use his vocal chords when before this, he never even knew he had a voice? The answer boils down to the above process of breathing. Immediately after birth (and before yelling), carbon dioxide levels start increasing rapidly in baby’s blood. The increased levels of carbon dioxide serve as a signal to the area of the brain responsible for respiration that tells him he must take in his first breath.
The brain then sends impulses to the diaphragm (the primary muscle of respiration) to contract and the rib cage to expand and draw in air. (It’s a feeling similar to holding your breath for a long time and having that strong urge to gasp for air). In newborns, this reflex is preprogrammed. (1) They take in a deep breath or long inhalation in a sharp gasp (2) They let out a long, loud breathe-out or exhalation in a yell (cry). Repeated crying out loud at this point helps them push out all the fluids in their lungs to further facilitate breathing.
3. He experiences Gravity and being Handled and Touched
Baby has just been roughly shoved out from swimming peacefully in a 98°F fluid environment to laying helplessly in 70° air where he can no longer turn or move like he could, much like a fish out of water! After enjoying buoyancy for 40 weeks, he is now immobilised by gravity. On top of that, the air is frigid, he is wet which makes him feel even colder, the lights are glaring, the sounds are loud and jarring. What’s more, strange creatures he has never seen before are touching and handling him, wiping him, probing and suctioning his nasal and oral orifices and turning him upside down and this way and that. Baby has never been touched or handled before. These first moments of life can be so traumatising. No wonder he responds by screaming on top of his lungs!
4. He Burns Brown Fat
From feeling nice and hot in the womb to suddenly freezing in an airconditioned room ─ a newborn will lose heat soon after being born. But not to worry. He comes equipped with an in-built survival kit. Receptors on the baby’s skin send messages to the brain that his body is cold. Baby’s body then automatically creates heat by burning stores of brown fat, a type of fat found only in fetuses and newborns. This heat generation is called thermogenesis. The brown fat keeps baby’s temperature from dropping. This is why newborns are rarely seen to shiver.
5. He Sees!
Although baby can differentiate light from dark from inside the womb starting from Week 16, his eyes are not fully formed until about Week 20. Baby first opens his eyes in the womb at Weeks 26 to 28. At birth, a newborn’s vision is between 20/200 and 20/400. He is near sighted and can only “see” blurry objects or people that are eight to 12 inches away. Their eyes are sensitive to bright light too, so they’re more likely to open their eyes in low light. Baby’s eyesight development is closely linked to his brain development.
Here are some eye-opening insights from Bausch+Lomb:
- At birth, babies see shapes by following the lines where light and dark meet.
- They need to be several weeks old before they can see their first primary colour – red.
- In their first weeks and months, babies have to “learn” how to see. Each eye has to learn to work together. This “binocular vision” will develop quickly throughout the first few weeks and months of life.
- In the first year, baby’s brain and eyes will begin to coordinate images and remember what they’ve seen.
- Newborns see only black, white and gray. Over the next 10 to 12 weeks, baby will follow moving objects and recognise things, especially toys and mobiles with bold, geometric patterns.
- As their colour vision begins to develop, babies will see red first. They will see the full spectrum of colours by the time they reach five months of age.
- Depth perception and eye-hand coordination begin to develop when infants reach approximately five months. From four to six months, baby begins to reach out and touch an object.
6. He Eats using his Mouth, Tastes using his Tongue, Swallows and uses Stomach for the first time
Before baby was born, he never felt hunger. He was constantly fed by the placenta through the umbilical cord to his navel. He never “ate” through his mouth or used his stomach the way we do, although he did taste the food with his tongue that mother ate by swallowing amniotic fluid.
Now, outside of the uterus, baby makes an instant switch from eating through the bloodstream to using his mouth.
He automatically knows how to use his mouth because all babies are born with several primitive reflexes. One of them is the Rooting Reflex where he opens his mouth wide whenever his cheek or lips are touched, sticks his tongue out and makes sucking sounds to indicate he wants to feed.
A study was done by videotaping several dozen babies at birth just to watch how inborn reflexes played a role in the first moments of birth. All the babies behaved the same way. Here is an excerpt of that study:
“When birth crying had stopped, the babies showed a short period of relaxation and then successively became alert. They went through an ‘awakening phase’, an ‘active phase’ with movements of limbs, rooting activity and looking at the mother’s face, a ‘crawling phase’ with soliciting sounds, a ‘familiarization phase’ with licking of the areola, and a ‘suckling phase’ and last, a ‘sleeping phase’.”
As can be seen, baby knew from the moment of birth that his mouth is where food must go in, his tongue is the taster and locator of food and sucking is how he gets food to go in.
Baby’s Stomach Size from Birth to One Month
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