Are Partner’s Really Prepared for Birth? | The Nesting Place: Prenatal Classes & Doula Care

While partners are much more involved in birth preparation than they used to be, we still have a long way to go in terms of offering them practical preparation for their experience of labour.

Witnessing labour is a difficult and exhausting role, but it is often played down with jokes and off-the-cuff comments like “there’s no way you’ll be sleeping if I can’t!” or “Don’t worry about me, she’s doing the hard work!” While the labouring woman has quite a large task to undertake, the role of birth support has immense challenges of it’s own.

The most prevalent challenge for partners that I’ve found is that most are not prepared for supporting a woman in vaginal birth without an epidural AND
have trouble knowing when to support a woman in choosing an epidural. For some women, medical pain support is very supportive and helpful. For others, emotional support is what they want or need for challenging moments in labour. Most prenatal classes offer good information about the physiological and medical aspects of epidurals but give partners little in the way of tools to navigate moments where they feel overwhelmed with the sites and sounds of a woman labouring without an epidural, or how they may continue to be hands on support during an epidural.

Penny Simkin’s recent study on emotional support for epidurals eloquently outlines this observation.

*Reference: Simkin, P. Emotional Support for the Woman With an Epidural International Journal of Childbirth Education; Sep 2003; 18, 3; ProQuest Nursing & Allied Health Source pg. 4

From this article and others like it, it becomes clear that partners need more than just information to be fully prepared in their role as support. At The Nesting Place, we’ve taken this into account when designing our prenatal classes. During our 12 hour course, parents will receive information about medical and non-medical pain support AND they’ll participate in activities that allow them to predict what their unique emotional landscape of birth might be.

Partners participate in all coping practices themselves and develop a coping-mindset to draw on for should they experience overwhelming moments during the birth. Partners will also practice being birth support in role play activities that simulate different intensities in birth and different ways of coping. From doing this, partners work through their insecurities about being birth support before they are asked to step up to the role. They develop greater comfort in seeing a birthing woman let go with intensity (moaning loudly, rocking, complaining, etc) and see themselves get better at knowing what to do as support over the course of the class.

During our conversation about epidurals partners gain a familiarity with how to navigate the moment a woman asks for an epidural (“My wife tells me that she really doesn’t want the epidural, so how serious should I take her if she says it in labour?”) and we explore the many ways that they can continue to offer physical and emotional support should she choose to use an epidural.

Our partner feedback forms have indicated that they leave class feeling significantly more confident in their ability to offer birth support. As partners do better as support and feel more confident in themselves, the pregnant mothers report feeling more at ease with the idea of labour since they know with deeper understanding that they can depend on their partner and don’t need to worry about them during the birth.

“Thinking back now that I’ve been through labour, what I valued most about our classes was being encouraged to talk about fears, concerns and anxieties in preparation for birth. Something I learned in class that I didn’t understand but that I was surprised to find helpful during birth was how much I would end up using co-moaning and “go-low” as support. Amanda was wonderfully supportive and sincere.”

For more information about our Toronto and Peterborough prenatal classes and refresher classes, we invite you to visit www.TheNestingPlace.ca

*Please contact Amanda for a copy of the referenced article – amanda@thenestingplace.ca