 I'd like to introduce Roma who is a doula living in Somerset in the UK. She's been a doula for over a decade and she is also a breastfeeding counsellor with the National Childbirth Trust and she now focuses on parenting and connections and at the moment she is passionate about birth and parenting as social activism on climate change. So Roma I have put, Roma did not want a presentation in the way of words and I don't blame her so she has some beautiful slides here and she's going to do this in a far more interactive way and I will move the slides on every so often because there's some very pretty ones. You'll probably have to wait Roma until everybody stops saying um ah before you move on to the next bit because they're beautiful slides. So Roma would you like to speak? You'll need to unmute yourself. Thank you Linda. Hi. That's great. Okay so off you go. Lovely okay so um the title of this is Breastfeeding Wires Society for Connection and um just to say I have been a breastfeeding counsellor with National Childbirth Trust um but I'm actually retired as a breastfeeding counsellor and my focus in this is um to talk about connection um so I'm sure many of you know a lot more about breastfeeding than I do and um hopefully um I can add the perspective of the kind of the bigger picture in terms of um why is connection so important um so humans are wired for connection it's actually one of our fundamental needs basic needs as a human um as fundamental as food sleep shelter uh we need connection more than a lot of us realise um and babies are born wired for connection so you've all seen how wide open the baby is in the first hour after birth and their priority um above all else even above getting food is actually to seek connection with their mother um and from that point onwards um connection is something that we continue to seek out so a baby's limbic system the social emotional centre of the brain is as mature at birth as an adult's limbic system and the job of the limbic system is to constantly be scanning for nonverbal cues that um give us a message around our emotional safety so we're scanning for am I loved am I safe am I welcome and as we get bigger we're constantly on the alert for do I fit in here do these people think I'm cool am I doing okay um so interestingly the limbic system is mature at birth which means in terms of emotional content our babies are as capable as communicating as we are um and um so the reason for this is that we are such social mammals that we are constantly seeking to um create our our brains are constantly syncing with one another and all of us now from sitting here together even on this call will start to be syncing brain waves we have mirror neurons in our brains that will be copying one another and we're effectively reaching out for attunement and attunement is that feeling like somebody else gets me it's so crucial for us to feel like we fit in and we belong and that we're okay um that we actually prioritize this above many other needs and the reason for that is on a new evolutionary level we didn't survive well when we were out of sync with the rest of the tribe so um um yeah I actually wanted to do a little demo with you Linda just to demonstrate the importance of connection so it's sometimes overlooked um so I was wondering if you're willing Linda if you would just spend a couple of minutes you might not even get that far even just a minute or 30 seconds telling us about your day today and I'm going to listen to you um in a kind of slightly awkward way okay that sounds ominous that does sound very ominous okay I can do that if you would go ahead and just tell us about your day Linda how are you doing today I'm doing okay it's been a long long day and nine I have been trying to keep on top of the chain whilst keeping an eye on the present sanctions here 95 so off putting 94 what's happening for you Linda wow I'm getting um I'm my my my flow of words is getting disrupted by um something that's absolutely incongruential to what I'm talking about and how does it feel annoying I am annoyed yeah yeah what's happening in your body um I think I started moving away from the screen uh-huh because I was kind of you know I started I started off by getting forward and thinking you all know know what you're gonna ask me to do now and then as you started doing that very loudly I started um my bottom started going back a bit on the chair and I started distancing myself gosh you make me able to think now what I did yeah yeah and initially I tried to interrupt you um yeah but then I knew I was on a losing in fact I tried really hard to concentrate on me um and ignore you but you were too persistent so I couldn't and uh I stopped in fact I stopped well to it before your um well before your 30 seconds probably after about 10 yes so that's how you got to 94 I'll tell you you got to 94 that's right yeah thank you for doing that that's right that's quite amazing um if you'd like to just give yourself a shake out or make some noise to release the tension from that I'll take I'll mute myself first thank you thanks for being willing to do that um yeah so that's a demonstration of how intolerable it feels for us to be out of connection and as adults we feel connected when somebody listens to us which was the exact opposite of what I was doing with Linda uh I was interrupting her I was not listening to what she said I was um off in my on my own tangent and you know really not responding to her communication at all um and that feels very stressful to us as humans um I'm terribly stressful actually um so you've got a lovely slide of my daughter doing uh some very lovely um baby led breastfeeding there um so um yeah I hope that's given you some insight into the kind of fundamental importance of connection on human well-being when we feel connected we thrive we can think better we can think more clearly and the reason for that is that the prefrontal cortex the part of the brain is responsible for thinking and making decisions and having good judgment language and um you know intellect uh as well as impulse control it's a kind of more complex human faculties um um the prefrontal cortex gets taken down by the limbic system when the limbic system is picking up a sense of disconnection so if you were picking up these cues that somebody wasn't paying good attention or that you weren't feeling welcomed or appreciated or listened to um what actually starts to happen is you're thinking your prefrontal cortex activity gets inhibited and it's harder and harder um as Lisa Linda sorry found to keep speaking um oh you've got some background so um there was a study done by ETR associates um they were looking for um what were they looking for initially they were looking for um anything that they could correlate with adverse outcomes in adolescence so they were looking at things like teenage pregnancy and suicide uh turning to crime self-harm drug use and what they discovered it was a meta-analysis looking at lots of different studies and it was longitudinal they discovered that um they could identify a super protective factor against adverse outcomes in adolescence and that super protector super protective factor um they identified it as parent child connectedness um so why is that relevant to breastfeeding um obviously the nutritional components of breast milk are off the scale um I always think it's funny that conventionally we question the value of breastfeeding beyond a certain point a year or two or whatever depending on what circles you're in um but if they made a pill that contained the concentration of enzymes and stem cells and immune components um that breast milk contains um it would be arguably unethical not to give it to everybody children and adults alike and um so yeah that doesn't even warrant the interaction between the baby's saliva and the breast so when a baby puts their mouth onto the nipple um whatever's in their saliva goes into gets absorbed into the pores of the mother's nipple and the breast intelligently fabricates a specific tailored breast milk um that is fed back to the baby within two hours so if the baby has come into contact with a virus breast will create specific antivirus and um tailor that into the breast milk which is you know it's phenomenal stuff however even with the nutritional components and that interaction I would propose that the more important impact of breastfeeding is actually in the way that it lays the foundation for connection and I'd love there to be more research on this this is an area that would be fascinating to explore in more depth um we know that there's a link between um mother's level of bonding through breastfeeding um protecting children against behavioral problems later on um and I would suspect that what's really going on is not so much about the mother bonding but actually the way that breastfeeding wires mothers and children the connection because it lays the foundation for something that we call contingent communication so contingent communication um you can see this going on in these slides actually contingent communication is where you pick up your newborn and their eyes immediately seek out yours and newborns learn so much through their gaze so whatever is reflected back to them is vital data for this work of figuring out you know being a human um how to fit in with the big people around here how to get food how to get them to pick me up um so every time we respond to a baby's communication it's a two-way communication process they seek out our gaze we respond by gazing back they maybe respond through some other communication we might respond through smiling um and that contingent communication goes back and forth and back and forth and that is what lays the foundation for responsiveness between a mother and a child and it's this level of responsiveness um that is so crucial in terms of our emotional development so so there's a few reasons for this um one is that um just the closeness of breastfeeding and the kind of mechanical action of the baby sucking on the breast um the skin to skin all of those things release in the mother and the baby and we know that the dose of oxytocin that gets released particularly in the first hour after birth through skin to skin is the largest dose of oxytocin a woman will ever receive in her lifetime and it actively rewires the brain towards more mothering type behaviors and um Mina's just said in my experience when I fed my baby that was like injecting my kindness to him through breastfeeding yes absolutely it's a way of offering our attention and our warmth and that's not to say that it can't be can't be replicated if you're not breastfeeding we'll touch on that in a bit um so one one aspect here is the oxytocin um and what this does is give mother a whole body nervous system reset so she might be going through her morning and particularly in a kind of nuclear family setup in modern society she's more than likely to be feeling stressed at some point in the day um and the very action of indecing how's that for the oxytocin connection we've got a slide here of um lots of milk spraying all over my baby's face um so sorry I was saying about the whole body reset so if the mother's going through the day she's more than likely to be accumulating tension throughout the day we're not actually supposed to be parenting in isolation we're in social animals we're supposed to be doing this in tribes um the correct ratio for an for adults to children in terms of optimizing connection is actually for adults to one child um and really rarely does that happen so more than likely a mother in in modern western society is likely to be feeling quite stressed through the day but she is enforced by the baby's hunger so pick up her baby and and put them to the breast every couple of hours or so and when that happens she and the baby are subject to a whole body nervous system reset so even if she's been feeling quite stressed out she's going to start feeling a lot more mellow quite quickly she's going to start breathing a bit more deeply even if she's been really stressed with her baby and she's sick of the sight of them by this point they've been crying for hours she's ready to hand them away she's going to start breathing and looking down and realizing that actually her baby's quite cute and then what's going to happen is um she's more likely to get drawn into contingent communication so her baby's going to look up at her with those big shiny eyes she's going to look down and the baby will probably do something cute and she's going to smile and this communication starts building and one of the aspects of um um what's going on in our communication is actually governed by the vagus nerve um so the vagus nerve is um it's switched on it's not the right way of describing it um what am I trying to say the vagus nerve um it it sort of governs what kind of mode we can be in in relation to one another and when a mother has gone through her morning and got quite stressed out what's happened is that she's fallen out of social engagement mode her nervous system is kind of bracing itself against other humans it's likely that her facial tone and her vocal affect have got kind of flat um I meant facial affect and vocal tone obviously um and the good news about social engagement mode is that it's contagious so the minute one or the other of the baby or the mother smiles or makes eye contact they're actually um going to contagiously um switch the other's nervous system so this is a very different picture to what might happen if you were feeding by bottle and this is a bit of a caricature this isn't always um this is you know kind of extreme version of how this could look but for example the mother that's getting stressed out with her screaming baby whose bottle feeding then has to make up a bottle which you know is taking her away from connecting with her baby the baby's getting more stressed out she's rushing to get the bottle made um and by the time she's feeding the baby she might just need a minute for herself understandably and rather than connecting with the baby she she might just be you know taking a moment to connect with herself and because she doesn't have this whole body reset which is inadvertent to breastfeeding and she might not necessarily get brought into connection with her baby through the feeding now of course that's not to say that a mother who's feeding by bottle is not going to connect with their baby through feeding it just means that you have to be a lot more conscious about it you have to be a lot more intentional um so there are ways to bottle feed responsively that can replicate what happens with breastfeeding behaviorally so you can um make sure that you're always holding your baby in your arms rather than propping the bottle you can make sure it's always mom or dad that feeds the baby so that you you know you aren't giving them to other people to feed missing out on that opportunity you could put the baby's skin to skin you could make sure that you're kind of looking down and stroking your baby and making eye contact and there's also been a link with feeding via bottle and um babies becoming overweight and that doesn't necessarily have to be the case I mean it can be the case even with express breast milk um but I think that's more down to the way that we're feeding babies with bottles because the suck reflex is activated by the teeth at the back of the throat so the baby's not so much leading the feeding and we can mitigate that by offering the bottle and then withdrawing the teeth and pausing for a few moments offering the bottle again um and so you know there are ways around this it's not you know it's not black and white it's not um that you're going to miss out on bonding and connection if you're not breastfeeding it's just really relevant that with breastfeeding it's inadvertent you don't have to pay attention to it it's going to happen automatically whether you're interested in creating connection or not so why is it relevant to why a society for connection why is that even something that we might aspire towards what does it even mean to have a more connected society I'm just gonna um um I'm gonna come back to any of the comments in the the chat actually um so there's been a lot of talk about climate change recently in the media and we're all quite aware that our planet is in quite a global situation at the moment um the consequences of not feeling connection with our parents and caregivers is that we can end up going through life feeling this kind of gnawing sense that we're not accepted we're not good this kind of unease or this longing this longing for connection and I'd go as far to say as humanity is actually fundamentally broken and the reason for that is that we we don't have enough of the thing that we all crave the most and really thrive upon which is connection and what happens when you have a society that doesn't have a strong sense of connection is that we're led to take more than we need this is not our natural state humans don't take more than they need more than any other animal it's a place that we've ended up in because we've overlooked this really basic human need and a lot of our parenting practices are not centered around connection so this sense of longing and um this connection feels so uncomfortable to us that we don't fully inhabit our bodies we feel disconnected from the people around us we feel disconnected from our communities and the planet that we live on and we're much more likely to behave in ways that are off track so we know what happens to teenagers if they miss out on that parent child connectedness and we can extrapolate that that's what's happening in wider society so if we want to build a healthy society and we want to build the kind of global consciousness that has the capacity to face the kind of emergent challenges that we're seeing on the planet right now you actually need to start with the very basic building blocks of looking at what way of birthing and raising our children is going to allow them to feel safe and loved and welcome because humans that have that built into them become ones that can really use their innate intelligence fully they're not under the strain of these uncomfortable feelings of feeling disconnected that are impacting on their ability to think well they're not driven by this deep sense of hurt and disconnection that causes us to kind of fill this whole room materialism and we're going to start seeing a whole generation that is well equipped to think creatively and intelligently and take leadership in terms of where we need to go next so yeah I feel like birth and parenting are absolutely a fast track global intervention and I feel like this is one thing that gives me really a lot of hope in a world that's looking quite bleak currently because it doesn't take long it would just require one generation of parents to be met with the correct information and supported adequately that they could foster enough connection in their offspring with their offspring that we become a society wired towards connection a much more resourced society and one that isn't driven by these kind of underlying hurts so yeah that's mostly what I wanted to say about that and I'm just going to look through these comments to see if there's anything I can respond to but if anyone has any questions I'd love to hear from you yes indeed if anybody feels like going activating their mic and speaking please do but that's we all know that yeah now that we've heard what you said it's kind of obvious isn't it really but we haven't really thought about it before you do get some wonderful responses from children and babies when you pay proper attention to them and as you say look at them and get down to their level and stroke them and do all this without being disrupted for by all the rest of the world at the time yeah so anyway over to you you have a look at the comments in the chat and see which ones you want to comment on thank you I love this comment from Effat who says when the baby tries to so the the baby tries to cover the mother's mouth if she speaks just to ask the mother to concentrate on the baby you can probably particularly as your babies get older you can probably relate to those times where you haven't been paying them full attention and they do everything they can to get your attention back and um if you're familiar with the still face experiment where a mother gave her warm attention to a baby and the baby was delighted and then she was asked there's a delighted baby um and then she was asked to keep her face completely still so this was what we were talking about um in terms of social engagement mode when your face is completely flat it actually signals threats to um well to another human but it's something that our babies can absolutely pick up on um so the baby got um tried to do lots of charming things to get her attention back at first and then I think even within about 30 seconds or it could have been sooner um it was flat out screaming uh really distressed trying to get the mother's attention back so yeah babies know what they need and can be relied upon to seek connection out and brain to increase endorphins endorphin levels all over there all over the life all through life relax life and normal personality absolutely yes thankfully kangaroo care is now being brought in for the nikku which is obviously wonderful progress so yeah love to hear from anyone if you'd like to anybody have any further questions or comments it's not a thing you can question really it's more about there we go nikki are you there roma i think you've gone kind of quiet wonderful to talk thank you i was just holding my grandchild age 18 months and he sticks his hand into the top of my t-shirt so naturally i was reminded of breastfeeding my own kids and i do agree that the connection just happens can be made in other ways but it has one of my children used to um we used to twiddle with one one breast while she was feeding from the other breast and she would do that with any woman that she went near including my mother who was a little bit strange about it in the first instance because it wasn't quite i don't know about everyone else but i just got a little somebody speaking just then all right i was speaking but i think i was losing you can that me is that you remember yes it was me but obviously i was breaking up i just had a short burst of what you were saying oh yes i think it might be um you actually it depends can anyone tell me who it is who's breaking up from your end oh that's weird i can't hear anything at the moment so and we still hear roma ah i think she's gone no are you back roma yes i think roma must have uh yes she's definitely speaking a little bit roma i think it's you that's breaking up a little bit can you hear me anyway roma if you can hear me um perhaps you might like to just um log out and log back in again only log out don't you and don't end the meeting so log out and then come back in again and see if that improves the sound way mean niki it's a wonderful being thing being a grandparent isn't it and i think that um grandparents can have a lot to do with this connectedness as well in fact we tend to have more time i don't know what anybody else thinks yes niki i agree with you too it's a highlighter by week when i look after my grandson one day a week and he puts his hand over my mouth sometimes to shut me up although normally it would need to be other people that tell me to shut up because i spend more time paying attention to him than i do to anybody else we're still having trouble with somebody trying to speak is that you roma again yes i definitely think we're having an issue with roma just now that's a shame right at the end of that presentation um perhaps if you have anything else to say roma you could perhaps type it into the text box because we're definitely having difficulty searing what you have to say i can't remember there any more slides here these are beautiful slides of roma no no i'll go back again these are beautiful slides of romas she she offered me them as she said you can use one of these if you like because she didn't want to put together a presentation quite right um and when i saw these slides there were about 10 of them i said can i use all of them there aren't actually 10 i've put in eight in the end but they are beautiful and the oxytocin one is amazing isn't that amazing so i don't know whether roma's going to manage to get back in but maybe we just need to leave it at that it's a shame um but i think roma could well be a speaker in the future somewhere for people so i think i'll just take over at this point and finish off the session if that's okay