Although skin-to-skin contact is elemental, the 'golden hour' concept can be unhelpful

Be ready to enjoy abundant skin-to-skin contact and frequent flexible offers of the breast after your baby is born

In the hospital setting immediately after the birth, whether it was vaginal or by caesarian section, your midwives will help you lie back against the pillows with your baby's bare little body tummy down upon the skin of your exposed chest or tummy.

When you are laid back with your baby secured against you by gravity, in skin-to-skin contact, her breastfeeding reflexes switch on. She's a little mammal. But skin-to-skin contact stabilises her body temperature and glucose levels and keeps her dialed down, as well as increasing the chances of breastfeeding success long-term.

Normal is, however, a very diverse human condition. Not all babies want to take the breast in that first hour. What matters is that they are offered the opportunity to be up close to your body and breast. Another loving person can offer skin-to-skin contact, too, whether a father, or other mother, or parent of non-binary gender, or carer.

And even when there are disruptions, such as sedation due to medications used with birth, or a traumatic birth experience, your newborn's biological drive to breastfeed is ancient and powerful and hardwired for months to come. The two of you just need ample opportunities to experiment together and work things out.

You and your baby are a complex adaptive system, which from an evolutionary perspective is incredibly resilient. You can find out about yourself and your breastfeeding baby as a biological system here and here.

If things don't go quite to plan at the beginning, which is often the way, then you just need to know how to do a repair, how to patiently call upon this inbuilt and ancestral resilience. That's what we're aiming to do in Possums Breastfeeding & Lactation.

It doesn't help to feel under pressure in the first few hours after birth

Some might tell you to hand express in the first hour after birth unless baby has breastfed well. You might hear that the 'golden hour' after birth is essential for not only skin-to-skin contact but also colostral removal. Some might say to offer the breast frequently in those first hours but also to hand express and offer colostrum as 'dessert from a spoon'.

My perspective is that it's not necessary to hand express your colostrum in the first hour after birth, and I worry that being put under pressure to do that may even be unkind.

This is because you, your baby, and your breasts are not machines which respond to rules and algorithms. We don't want to put pressure on the first numinous, vulnerable hour of your baby's life, when you may be in shock or feeling numb or in pain, when the baby is adapting and orienting to the strangeness of this world.

We just want you to relax back on the bed after the extraordinary work of giving birth, and let life wash through you as you meet this new little human that you made.

It's great to offer skin-to-skin opportunity at least every couple of hours but even continuously, with the help of others, throughout the first 24 hours of your baby's life in this world. But just do what feels enjoyable and sensible and easy to you! There's no 'right' way, actually, as long as there is lots of physical closeness near your breasts, as well as with the bodies of others.

You might snuggle your baby up, but not fuss so much with having both your own body and baby's body completely bare. Feeling as though you both have to have skin exposed, especially when it's cold, can make it all feel too complicated. Best to do lots of snuggling up, even if you're not exactly skin-on-skin.

You could express milk in the first hour after birth of course, if you want to and it is comfortable and no-fuss. If baby is affected by anaesthetic medications and sleepy, or if baby has a medical condition, some women hand express immediately in the hope of improving their chance of a good milk supply.

But to my mind, keeping the baby close to you and knowing how to avoid any nipple damage and set up pain-free transfer of the colostrum when baby does suckle is what matters most in the first hours after your baby is born.

We don't need everything to be ideal at the beginning for breastfeeding to succeed

Normal is a very diverse human condition, and each baby's needs are different. Striving for an ideal at the very beginning can even spoil what is best for you and your baby's breastfeeding success long term, because too much pressure is placed on you and the baby to make it happen.

We don't need everything to be ideal to succeed. We just need enough to go right, enough of the time. That's the nature of complex biological systems, which are resilient. You can find out why you and your baby are a biological system here.

Setting up your breastfeeding relationship is about workability, not perfection. Breastfeeding is much more resilient than people acknowledge. We can usually retrieve supply even if the baby hasn't been transferring milk as often as we might have wished in the first few days, as long as the two main things that undermine happy and easy breastfeeding in our society are addressed. These are breast tissue drag, so very often not identified, and frequent and flexible offers of the breasts, even if the baby is only on the breast for short periods of time.

Often everything else is blamed, when these two most important problems have not been addressed.