Golden hour
Also called the golden hour, Golden Hour, golden hours
The golden hour is the first hour after a baby is born, when the baby lies skin to skin on the parent's chest. Midwives use it for keeping the two together that hour, often until the first feed.
How it's said
The "Golden Hour" is the first hour right after your baby is born.
Good God, what fresh hell is this golden hour?!
...I felt a real need to hold them and to touch them; that's when we had our many golden hours.
Who says it
Not to be confused with
- Skin-to-skin is the holding itself, a bare baby on a bare chest, and it can happen at any time. The golden hour is one particular hour, the first one after birth.
Where it came from
The phrase comes from emergency medicine, where the golden hour is the time just after a serious injury. Surgeon R Adams Cowley is credited with promoting the idea, later as head of the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center.
Newborn medicine borrowed it for the first sixty minutes of a baby's life, and a 2017 review traces that use to a 2009 paper on the first hour of care for small babies. Maternity units now use it for the first hour of skin-to-skin contact, and birth writers note how popular the phrase has become in recent years.
Photographers have their own golden hour, the time just after sunrise or before sunset when daylight is softer and redder.