Often, dads-to-be can become paralyzed when a medical care professional like their Obstetrician, Obstetrical Nurse, or Certified Nurse Midwife walks into the room to perform some kind of birth assessment or procedure. As a birth-coach, you might feel overwhelmed, but here’s the thing: no one is going to stop you from using your skills. In fact, birth-care professionals want to see you and your partner working together as a team. They’ll appreciate you all the more for it and it’ll even give you more say in your child’s birth.
Your medical care professionals have been present at thousands of births. Because of this, they want to see more skills-focused families; not merely ‘choice-based’ ones. With a skills-based approach, you’ll know what to do, as well as when and how to do it, and this will only make the job of your medical care professional easier. It will please and impress them to see that you have the right skills to help them. Let your medical care professionals do their job, while you as the dad-to-be can do your job – that is, by being a skilled birth-coach.
Sure, it might seem like a funny thing, but how you behave will affect how your medical professionals treat you. Most importantly, it’ll affect how much control they’ll give you over the birth. The more skilled and competent you appear to be, the more trusted you’ll be to make decisions regarding the birth. But the more out-of-control or disconnected you seem, the less trusted you’ll be. And the less trusted you are, the less control you’ll have over the birth.
With the right birth-coaching skills, you can stay on top of your visit to the hospital. You’ll know exactly what you need to do, and your medical care professionals will respect you for it.
Birthing Better online birth classes and all the skills were developed by hundreds of fathers and mothers and housed in Common Knowledge Trust.