IBCLC Detailed Content Outline: Psychology, Sociology, and Anthropology Focused CERPs - Section V

As opposed to being considered the optimal way to feed a baby, breastfeeding should instead be considered the norm. Human milk is the most appropriate food for all babies, even if the mother is experiencing health issues or challenging life conditions. Human milk, despite maternal conditions, is the best source of food for children. Lifestyle, maternal diet, environmental exposures, and stress, among other factors, can impact health outcomes. This leads to the question of whether these factors can also affect human milk composition. Can babies become nutritionally deficient from the composition of their mother’s milk? What is deficiency? How are those thresholds calculated? This presentation will shed light on this subject, which is undergoing a tremendous amount of new research.

The age-old practice of mindfulness meditation has increased in popularity across the globe over the past four decades and gained traction within the psychological and medical fields. Mindfulness centers on non-judgmental awareness of one’s bodily sensations, thoughts, and emotions in the present moment. It has been scientifically shown to reduce stress, chronic pain, medical and psychological symptoms, and enhance immune function. Mindfulness practices often focus on psychobiological processes, which makes them well suited as in intervention during the perinatal period, and even more specifically breastfeeding. This presentation outlines the ways in which mindfulness can positively impact lactation, during its normal course and especially when there are challenges. As lactation professionals who clinically and holistically support clients, it is beneficial to be able to share mindfulness strategies that can serve as a bridge between the mental, emotional, and physiological realms. Through a greater understanding of the practical aspects of mindfulness, gentle interventions can be incorporated into each feeding session. By supporting calm and connection within the parent and between the parent and infant, the experience of breastfeeding can be enhanced.

This talk will focus on the Movement Based Learning (MBL) program and how it can be used by healthcare professionals, as well as families, to support a healthy and efficient early childhood development. The MBL designed movements can be used as an effective tool to help develop motor, cognitive, and emotional skills in children, supporting them to successfully navigate through the developmental milestones. Practical MBL tools will be shared with the participants that can be implemented in the children's daily lives to help them reach their full potential.

In the absence of adequate banked donor human milk for distribution to all infants in need, many families choose to engage in the practice of Private Arrangement Milk Sharing (PAMS), partially facilitated through social media, to procure human milk for their infants. Evidence regarding the participant and infant characteristics, and risk abatement practices is limited. This presentation explores the state-of-the-science of PAMS, characteristics of recipient participants and infants, donor screening practices, and risk abatement strategies. Results are contextualized with a socioecological framework of factors affecting infant feeding practices. Influence of health care providers, lactation support, birth attendant, and sources sought during decision making and the impact of these influences on supporting families are discussed.

Advances in pediatric ethics have helped identify ethical concerns that arise in the care of children as well as strategies for addressing these concerns. Despite these important innovations, some significant ethical problems persist in neonatology, which seem rooted in particular challenges involved in the care of newborns and their families. These include concerns regarding: excessive care for infants with limited prognoses; dismissive care toward projected disability; providing palliative care; parental roles and responsibilities; inadequate pain management; cross-cultural disagreements; and moral distress among staff and parents. These tensions commonly relate to: (a) difficulties in defining infants’ best interests; (b) tensions regarding the respective decisional authority of parents and health professionals; and (c) tragic situations where all treatment options seem wrong. Strategies for analyzing and reconciling these ethical concerns will be discussed.

In this session, we'll explore a deeper understanding of what obstetric violence is and the many ways it manifests to undermine and harm birthing people—as well as puts their caregivers and support teams in compromising positions. We'll discuss how birth professionals can avoid committing or contributing to obstetric violence themselves and how they can help make trauma informed care--including self-healing--the industry standard.

Bringing the practices of mindfulness to our patients and ourselves can significantly impact our patients' relationship to pain and fear in labor, birth, and life. In this hour long presentation, participants will have an opportunity to experience a mindfulness practice and learn ways to implement mindfulness in childbirth and parenting. Participants will be exposed to how mindfulness meditation can decrease stress during pregnancy and beyond and hear about mindfulness skills for working through pain and fear in childbirth. Further, participants will learn how to encourage mindfulness life skills for parenting with wisdom, kindness, and connection from the moments of birth, as well as how mindfulness skills may be implemented as a way to disrupt intergenerational patterns of suffering. In particular, this presentation will offer concrete ways to bring mindfulness to the contractions of labor, and to the space in between the contractions of labor. The potential for separating "pain" from "suffering" using mindfulness practices will be explored, which can be applied to labor, and of course, to life. We will examine the research around mindfulness based interventions, the relationship between perinatal stress and outcomes, and the potential that mindfulness strategies have for reducing health disparities.

The perinatal period, including pregnancy and postpartum, is a unique time in a woman's life that presents with increased nutritional needs. A majority of women may find it more challenging to meet increased nutritional needs due to the overwhelming demands and stressors that are associated with this time period. Risks of inadequate nutrition during the perinatal period can include prolonged healing and increased risk of maternal mental health disorders, including postpartum depression. Perinatal health professionals can play a crucial role in helping women optimize their nutritional needs during pregnancy and postpartum to support birth, recovery and improve maternal mental health outcomes.

There is often some confusion and skepticism regarding the treatment methods of manual therapies and in particular Osteopathy. The principles of Osteopathic Medicine were discovered over 100 years ago by Dr A T still, a Medical Doctor and Surgeon. This presentation aims to outline the key principles of Osteopathy that will enable a clearer understanding of how anatomy and physiology are addressed in relation to structure and function of the human body. The application of Osteopathic Medicine will be discussed in particular to the pregnant woman and the immediate postnatal period. The research surrounding osteopathy will be discussed and some thought provoking theories around common compensatory patterns in the newborn. Abdominal palpation and the birthing process will be touched on in relation to newborn discomforts. The presentation will be thought provoking and will highlight areas of research that are well overdue for both osteopathic medicine, and the care of the newborn within midwifery.

It is well known that breastfeeding is beneficial to both mother and baby. What happens if breastfeeding is not well established? Researchers are looking closer to postpartum mood disorders and what influence breastfeeding may have in a new mother's psychological well being.

Postpartum depression has been linked to low breastfeeding rates, as well as lower duration rates. Postpartum depression falls under the diagnosis of "major depressive disorder with peripartum onset during pregnancy or in the weeks following delivery" (Bascom & Napolitano, 2015). It has been estimated that postpartum mood disorders, strike an estimated 10-20% of new mothers (Bascom & Napolitano, 2015). However, it has been argued that this number reflects only those women who have sought help for their symptoms. The probability that more women are affected by postpartum mood disorders is high.

Postpartum mood disorders adversely affect not only the health of the mother, but also the relationship with her partner, interaction with her newborn and infant growth (Yusuff, Tang, Binns, Lee, 2015). There are several predictors that can help determine if a woman is at risk for postpartum mood disorders, including mental health history, social status, and labor and delivery. Researchers have found that when more medical interventions were used during labor, the higher the depressive symptoms for the mother. This presentation will aid personnel working with new families to be aware of the signs and syptoms of postpartum mood disorders and how to preserve the breastfeeding relationship.