Why it helps to think of you and your baby as a single biological ecosystem when you're facing breastfeeding challenges

The mother and baby or parent and baby are a single biological system

Evolutionary biologists tell us that a mother and her baby are most helpfully understood as a single biological ecosystem for at least the first nine months of baby's life. We are able to give our baby the best possible gut and immune protection and neuroprotection, if we think of it this way.

But thinking of yourself and your baby as a single biological ecosystem won't make life with your little one even harder than it already is! Health professionals have worried about this for years, which is why some have been so slow to advocate for flexible, responsive care.

The Possums programs don't require you to do any kind of 'extreme' parenting. But once we cut through the myths, thinking of yourself and your baby as a single biological system usually makes life easier for the whole family. We work with the scientific knowledge from evolutionary biology to help make caring for your baby workable and enjoyable in our own complicated contemporary 21st century environments.

The science of various physiological systems involved in breastfeeding show that your baby and yourself form a single biological system. Mental, physiological and motor development go best for babies if we behave towards our little ones in this way. Here's some examples of how the research shows that a loving parent and baby are a single biological system.

• Kangaroo care improves the outcomes for infants who are born preterm.

• Skin-to-skin contact regulates newborn temperature, dials down the newborn's sympathetic nervous system, and improves breastfeeding outcomes.

• The microbiome of the mother's nipple and breast skin, her breast milk, and her gut interact with the baby's oral and gut microbiomes, shaping and protecting each other.

• Lots of physical contact, sensory stimulation, carrying, and social interaction protect babies' motor outcomes.

• Babies are most settled in the first few months of life when they are fed frequently and flexibly, and receiving ample physical contact with a loving carer.

In any complex system, there is great deal of buffering and resilience. It's not that everything needs to go perfectly for your baby to grow and flourish! It's not that a woman can always breastfeed or even wants to breastfeed, for instance. It's just about working with your and your baby's biological system as a whole, instead of thinking that we need to treat the baby as a separate system.

You can trust in the flexibility and resilience of your mother-baby or parent-baby ecosystem!

Another important thing to know about a biological system is that it's self-organising. In Possums Breastfeeding & Lactation, this means that you experiment a lot, looking for what feels good and right for you and your own unique baby.

It also means that a lot of the problems which arise can be helped, once we know how to treat a breastfeeding mother and her baby as a single system. That's not to say that the Possums programs will always help, but there is often a lot that can be done.

Recommended resources

• You can find out more about resilience, the butterfly effect, and being a biological system as you breastfeed your baby here.

• You can find out why breastfeeding is a symphony of biological systems here.

• You can find out why the breastfeeding mother-baby pair are a complex adaptive system or CAS (not a dyad) here

• You can find out about the highly mouldable baby brain here.