Rooming-In vs. Nursery Care

Rooming-in. This is the option we encourage most mothers and babies to enjoy. Full rooming-in allows you to exercise your mothering instincts when the hormones in your body are programmed for it. In our experience, and that of others who study newborns, mothers and babies who fully room-in enjoy the following benefits:

Rooming-in babies seem more content because they interact with only one caregiver—mother.

Full rooming-in changes the caregiving mindset of the attending personnel. They focus their attention and care on the mother, who is then more comfortable and able to focus on her baby.

Rooming-in newborns cry less and more readily organize their sleep-wake cycles. Babies in a large nursery are sometimes soothed by tape recordings of a human heartbeat or music. Rather than being soothed electronically, the baby who is rooming-in with mother is soothed by real and familiar sounds.

Mother has fewer breastfeeding problems. Her milk appears sooner, and baby seems more satisfied.

Rooming-in babies get less jaundiced, probably because they get more milk.

A rooming-in mother usually gets more rest. She experiences less separation anxiety, not wasting energy worrying about her newborn in the nursery, and in the first few days newborns sleep most of the time anyway. It's a myth that mothers of nursery-reared babies get more rest.

Rooming-in mothers, in our experience, have a lower incidence of postpartum depression.

All babies are born with a group of special qualities called attachment- promoting behaviors— features and behaviors designed to alert the caregiver to the baby's presence and draw the caregiver, magnet like, toward the baby. These features are the roundness of baby's eyes, cheeks, and body; the softness of the skin; the relative bigness of baby's eyes; the penetrating gaze; the incredible newborn scent; and, perhaps, most important of all, baby's early language—the cries and precrying noises.

Here's how the early mother-infant communication system works. The opening sounds of the baby's cry activate a mother's emotions. This is physical as well as psychological. Upon hearing her baby cry, a mother experiences an increased blood flow to her breasts, accompanied by the biological urge to pick up and nurse her baby. This is one of the strongest examples of how the biological signals of the baby trigger a biological response in the mother. There is no other signal in the world that sets off such intense responses in a mother as her baby's cry. At no other time in the child's life will language so forcefully stimulate the mother to act.

The mother who has missed the opening scene in this biological drama because she was not present when her baby started to cry is nonetheless expected to give a nurturing response to her baby some minutes later. By the time the nursery- reared baby is presented to the mother, the infant has either given up crying and gone back to sleep (withdrawal from pain) or greets the mother with even more intense and upsetting wails. The mother, who possesses a biological attachment to the baby, nevertheless hears only the cries that are more likely to elicit agitated concern rather than tenderness. Even though she has a comforting breast to offer the baby, she may be so tied up in knots that her milk won't eject, and the baby cries even harder.

As she grows to doubt her ability to comfort her baby, the infant may wind up spending more time in the nursery, where, she feels, the "experts" can better care for him. This separation leads to more missed cues and breaks in the attachment between mother and baby, and they go home from the hospital without knowing each other.

Not so with the rooming-in baby. He awakens in his mother's room, his pre-cry signals are promptly attended to, and he is put to the breast either before he needs to cry or at least before the initial attachment-promoting cry develops into a disturbing cry. Thus, both mother and baby profit from rooming-in. Infants cry less, mothers exhibit more mature coping skills toward their baby's crying, and the infant-distress syndrome (fussiness, colic, incessant crying) is less common than with nursery-reared babies. We had a saying in the newborn unit: "Nursery-reared babies cry harder; rooming-in babies cry better."A better term for "rooming-in" may be "fitting in." By spending time together and rehearsing the cue-response dialogue, baby and mother learn to fit together well—and bring out the best in each other.

Rooming-In vs. Nursery Care

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