Can I share my story for a second?

My experience as a first-time parent started out differently than I expected. I did all the right things: I waited until I was ready, took classes about childbirth and breastfeeding, read all the books, and even started attending La Leche League meetings when I was just four months pregnant. I'm an over-preparer, but I really just wanted to do this right.

And then I became a mom.

I knew having a baby was going to be hard, but I wasn’t prepared for how overwhelming it would be to feel inadequate to be responsible for a tiny human.

I loved my baby, but he didn’t behave like the books said he would. He didn’t give me 'feeding signs'; he went from asleep to full-on hangry in 10 seconds. Sleeping was hard; he couldn't sleep without me holding him. Feeding was confusing, tummy time was a no-go, and the latching pain was unbearable. It all felt impossible.

I started second-guessing myself constantly, my confidence tanked, and I felt like I was doing everything wrong. I even wondered if I was cut out to be a mother.

If I asked for advice from four different people, I would get four contradictory answers. Nothing worked or felt right to me. When I started looking for my own answers, I discovered that much of what I was told wasn’t based on actual science; it was just 'the way things were done.' It made everything feel so confusing.

I struggled through my first baby, and with my second, I followed the same advice and got the same frustrating results—painful feeding, exhaustion, self-doubt, and lots of shame. There were times when I even wondered if my own baby hated me.

But I refused to give up.

I didn’t know much about babies before I had one, but with a Master’s in Biology, I knew something was off. The pain and difficulty with feeding didn’t add up. Determined to find a better way, I dove into learning about infants, eventually becoming a lactation consultant. This led to years of studying infant feeding, newborn brains, and reflexes.

That’s when my big discovery happened.

One day, while going for a long walk and reflecting on infant feeding, latching, and positioning, it struck me: the baby's chin might hold the key to better latching. That single thought changed everything. I returned to my private practice and began experimenting with this idea, and that’s when I realized something remarkable.

Every time I gently touched a baby's chin, I noticed an unexpected response—those tiny mouths opened wide. I was shocked. I’d always been taught, both as a new parent and in my lactation training, to get a baby to open their mouth by stroking their upper lip down toward their mouth.

In practice, I noticed that the traditional cue didn’t prompt the same wide-open mouth as the chin-based reflex. Instead, it often caused babies to suck the nipple in too quickly, leading to pain and damage.

The more I worked with the chin-based reflex, the more I realized that traditional methods hadn’t fully tapped into an infant’s innate reflexes. The chin, I discovered, was key to improving latching.

The simple change of touching the chin instead of stroking the nipple down the mouth stopped latch pain and nipple damage almost instantly.

What has surprised me most about improving latching is its impact on the entire newborn experience. I’ve watched countless parents go from doubt and guilt-ri