Objective To explore the influence of early mother-infant skin-to-skin contact on the mother-infant relationship. Methods A semi structured interview was conducted within 18 pregnant women who had participated in SSC, and the data was analyzed by Nvivo12 software. Results Five core codes were extracted from the interview text, SSC could promote the establishment of mother-infant relationship through five aspects: improving maternal delivery experience, increasing positive feelings, accelerating maternal role transformation, promoting maternal-infant emotional bonding, and enhancing maternal parenting effectiveness; the number of coding nodes after SSC were greater than the number before SSC, including maternal positive feelings, newborn physical characteristics, maternal-infant bonding, role transformation, and delivery experience. SSC provided more opportunities for mothers to pay attention to the newborn, enriched their delivery experience, and allowed them to express themselves in more words during interviews. Conclusion Early SSC has a positive impact on the mother-infant relationship, and implementation is feasible. However, promotion strategies need to be improved. For example, modern information technology can be used to achieve the efficiency and convenience of promotion and research; other measures include adjusting maternal cognition, enriching educational strategies, and improving implementation processes.