There are 3 parts to a Skills-based childbirth trend:
- Prepare your pregnant body to become a birthing body.
- Learn birth skills
- Learn birth coaching skills
Opps. There’s a 4th part … make a Skills-based Birth Plan alongside your conventional Birth Plan.
There are 2 parts to the present Choice-based childbirth trend:
- Gather information
- Make a Birth Plan
Today we’re going to discuss the importance of having your loved one/s … family or friends … learn birth coaching skills so they can actually be helpful to you during The Birth. Don’t go into a birth with a person/people who are going to stand around and not know how to get involved. Giving birth is not a spectator event, it’s a strong activity full of vigorous work and you need people who can help you do that work.
When the US had a follow-your-doctor’s-order childbirth trend, fathers/others were not permitted to be with the birthing mother. It was during that short Skills-based childbirth trend from the 1960s/1970s when fathers began to participate and thankfully they did so from a skilled basis. Fathers/others are encouraged now and expected but they rarely know how to help now because the present Choice-based childbirth trend actually dismissed and discouraged birth skills as unessential and dismissed and discouraged coaching skills as inappropriate. The message … the role of the partner/other is merely to support the woman in her choices. Shame. We’re now in 2 generations of unskilled families and it shows in the mess and conversation surrounding childbirth today. That’s why we are such strong advocates for a Skills-based childbirth trend. We need skilled birthing families.
What skills do a partner/other need to really be involved, engaged and participating in a skilled manner as a birth coach?
- Help the woman prepare her pregnant body for birth. We share the same human body. It’s fun to learn how to create space for the baby’s birth journey. It’s fascinating, simple to do and so worthwhile.
- Learn birth coaching skills alongside the birth skills the woman is learning.
- If possible definitely help with the Internal Work.
- Your job is to simply help the woman work through the birth journey as it unfolds because doing so invests the baby’s family an incredibly deep sense of involvement in welcoming this child.
- Learn how-to work as a team with the birthing woman alongside your birth providers.
- Learn how-to see and hear how the birthing woman is responding to what is happening to and around her so you know exactly when to help her stay on top of, manage, cope well and deal with the unfolding of the birth process.
Birth coaching skills are so essential. A skilled partner/other instills confidence in the woman. A skilled partner/other signals their commitment to the transition from pregnancy to parenting. This baby will be a member of a family, helping at their birth just inspires that connection. There is NO birth provider who will stop you from using birth coaching skills. They will admire you, praise you and tell you frankly they wish more families had skills. Birth providers know how unskilled fathers/ others really are now and many older ones know there was a time when they saw almost every family come into their baby’s birth using skills.
Here’s a link. This link will be put on all the posts. Kristen has 6 kids, the last 3 are PK babies. She KNOWS about birth and is one of our affiliates. That means if you purchase The Pink Kit through her she gets a commission. Her husband Scott’s first baby was a Pink Kit experience. He’ll explain how The Pink Kit made certain he was able to become a skilled birth coach to a woman who had previously had three great births.!
Kristen’s written a time-line calendar for use of The Pink Kit. You just need to sign up to her mail list (we don’t keep a mail list) and she’ll send you the Time Line. She’s worked through both Edition #2 and #3 of The PInk Kit so she knows all it’s imperfections and la-dee-dahs past them to the skills she wants to improve for each birth. Can women and men have better births each time? Sure can! The more skilled, the more we master the experience.
http://blog.naturalbirthandbabycare.com/pink-kit-timeline-from-natural-birth-and-baby-care-com/
Please join the Movement to grow a Skills-based childbirth trend. Don’t’ let another birth go by without that family being skilled.