How to Care For a Newborn's Umbilical Cord

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Liz Hood on behalf of Expert Village and I am talking about how to give your baby a bath. Now in this segment I am going to go over umbilical cord care. Now, some doctors say to not touch the umbilical cord at all. Some say just use plain water and a cotton swab. Some say use a Q-Tip with either hydrogen peroxide or rubbing alcohol. I personally use a cotton Q-Tip and rubbing alcohol. All I do is kind of dip it in there and then squeeze out the excess up against the inner part of the bottle at the top. You just take the Q-Tip and go around the umbilical cord. You can kind of go a little bit in between the umbilical cord and where the skin is and he doesn't have an umbilical cord anymore but let's just pretend. Now, when you are dressing your newborn you want to go ahead and if you don't have special newborn diapers, go ahead and flip over the top so that the diapers aren't rubbing up against the umbilical cord and it's actually better if you just dress the baby in just diapers and a t-shirt so that they don't have something like over that area. It will dry out a lot faster. "