In plain words
Rooming-in means the baby stays in the same room as the parent for the whole hospital stay, day and night, instead of going to a nursery between feeds. It makes it easier to feed on cue, to learn the baby's signals, and to get help quickly. Many parents like it, and many nurses see it as support for early breastfeeding. Some families choose nursery care for sleep, recovery after surgery, or other reasons, and that is also a valid choice. The includes rooming-in as a standard, and many hospitals offer it. Research on rooming-in is limited, so much of the case for it rests on observation and practice standards. Hospital policies differ.
The deeper version
Rooming-in is the practice of keeping the newborn in the parent's room throughout the hospital stay. A Cochrane review (Jaafar and colleagues, 2016) identified one small trial and judged the evidence insufficient to show an effect on breastfeeding duration. Rooming-in is a standard element of the WHO and UNICEF Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative, whose standards rest largely on observational evidence and feeding-cue reasoning. Its effects on maternal sleep, postpartum mood, and infant weight are mixed in observational data, and the controversy often centers on sleep deprivation versus proximity. Trial evidence for many aspects of hospital practice remains thin, and how to offer rooming-in to people recovering from or complicated births is a practical question.
Where it comes up
- What to pack (and what to leave home)Getting Ready for Birth
- Skin-to-skin and the golden hourGetting Ready for Birth
- The hospital stay: what happens, what to askBirth and the First Days
What mothers here say about rooming-in
No one has posted under this term yet.
Sources
- Jaafar SH, Ho JJ, Lee KS — Rooming-in for new mother and infant versus separate care for increasing the duration of breastfeeding. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (2016)
- World Health Organization and UNICEF — Implementation guidance: protecting, promoting and supporting breastfeeding in facilities providing maternity and newborn services: the revised Baby-friendly Hospital Initiative (2018)