7/8/2024 0 Comments Normal Newborn FeedingWe need support to feed our babies not "breastfeeding promotion" Maybe the most common question you will have been asked in your antenatal appointments is how are you planning to feed your baby? The most common advice is likely to have been you “should” breast/chest feed. So many parents find the flip side of this is once the baby is born if they have any experience other than a perfectly latching and growing baby with no effort the advice changes to perhaps you “should” just give them a bottle. This situation leads to so many parents feeling they have failed and feeling guilty. This is the difference between breastfeeding promotion and baby feeding support. So let's be really honest. Establishing breast/chest feeding is probably more often than not an intense experience where challenges have to be faced and worked through. It is completely normal to need support with feeding your baby. Am I making enough milk? Should my nipples be this painful? The most common concerns that new parents have are making sure their baby is getting enough milk and having comfortable nipples.
Having realistic expectations can really help you with feeling confident that your baby is getting enough milk. Knowing your baby will need to feed AT LEAST 8-10 times in 24 hours can help but experiencing that may still feel overwhelming. Most babies don’t feed at exactly regular intervals. Eight times in 24 hours would be once every three hours but more likely there will be times when your baby sleeps for 4 hours and times when they want to feed again 10 minutes after the last time they fed. It’s very common for there to be a time of day, often early evening, when your baby feeds constantly on and off for a couple of hours or so, this is called cluster feeding. It’s also important to remember that feeding can be for lots of reasons not just for hunger, sometimes it’s for comfort or pain relief or connection.
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A taste of our online meet-ups. Everyone's experience and opinion is valid. When we set our topics for our meet-ups we try to find topics that will be interesting to a wide variety of people. Often we talk about perinatal mental health and we sometimes find people aren't sure if that applies to them. Even people who have struggled with feeling anxious or low mood while pregnant or parenting can be given the impression by society and the healthcare system that they should just get on with it and not moan because other people have it worse. So for future reference, if you see mental health on our topic list and wonder, yes this is for you. Another important note when we're talking about perinatal emotional and mental health we're not just talking about mums and birthing people. Partners, dads, all parents can struggle during the year or more around having a baby and all of the same things about reaching out for and providing your self with support apply to all of us. Peer support matters. ![]() Hopefully, the tide is turning and we're getting the message out to more people that we all deserve love and support and we don't need to reach a level of not coping to reach out for that support. Our meet-ups (and other groups that connect you with people who are pregnant at the same time or have a similar age baby) are one of the things that fill the gap between trying to struggle through alone feeling overwhelmed and being really unwell and needing medical care for mental illness. Never underestimate the importance of connection with other people (especially people at a similar life stage to you) for positive mental and emotional well-being. One of the things that many of the people at our recent online meet-up (where we covered this topic) identified with was that they don't always know how to put into words how or why they feel anxious, overwhelmed or sad but when other people talk about how they feel they can recognise that in themselves. Just knowing they are not alone helps many people to feel a little better. Our favourite part of talking about mental and emotional wellness is everyone sharing the things that help them to develop healthy coping mechanisms in the long term and the things that help them pull through the tough moments. Birth is just the start. This post is about planning for your birth and beyond in the context of planning for the fact that birth is just the start of the rest of your life. It's a bit like a post on planning your wedding that is mostly about planning for your marriage. Your birth and parenting experience is a journey into the great, exciting, unknown. You can't control everything, some things will happen that you're not expecting but you can give yourself the gift of support and knowledge that allows you to not just survive but thrive.
There's a saying: "It takes a village to raise a child" and that used to be naturally built into our daily lives. But modern-day parents are increasingly finding themselves coming into parenting with the expectation that it's all on them. We see parenting reflected in the media and on social media as something done inside a small nuclear family. We get the impression that we're expected to be able to meet all our children's needs by ourselves and even, if we're doing it "right", to find that experience blissful and fulfilling. You and Information - Best Friends for Pregnancy, Birth and Beyond. 1. Information is Not Advice. ![]() Everyone has their own life experiences and opinions which may colour the way they present information and make it seem a lot like advice. Sometimes our own understanding of the world, or previous experiences, can make us feel pressured to make choices that feel implied by the information someone has selected to give us. An important thing to be aware of, and a skill to learn during pregnancy that will serve you very well as a parent and through life, is how to filter what you hear so you can spot the information and separate it from the advice so that you can decide what the right choices are for you. One example of this might be when you’re offered an induction of labour. You will be given information about why you are being offered an induction of labour by your care provider. Some of this may be in the form of advice to take up the offer. You might then think "I’m not sure if this is the right choice for me" and want to chat through with a friend. Your friend may have had an experience of having labour induced and may have negative memories from that. The information about her experience may also feel like advice. You might then also look up information on the internet about induction of labour (if you decide to do this, you’re very welcome to ask in our Facebook group if anyone knows any reliable sources of accurate information) and you may find that information is presented from many different perspectives. Ultimately, however, you will find some things resonate with you and this information is useful for your own decision-making process. Then you are able to discard the other information and advice which isn’t helpful or relevant to you. This can help you feel really confident in your own decisions and is a life skill which can help with your confidence as you learn to parent and throughout life. 6/4/2024 0 Comments Owning your birth environment![]() In some senses, we're all birthing within the same environment. We're all living in the same culture and most of us are being cared for by the same medical system. Some things are outside of our control like how well-funded our local maternity services are or what the priorities of the management teams are. We see headlines in newspapers and form an expectation of what's "normal" from the births we see in television dramas. Pregnancy is a time were we can really start to reflect on how our cultural and family environment has affected us and our expectations and about what is in our control to change within ourselves. If you didn't even know you had choices about your birth we hope this information will get you started thinking about the things inside your control and what choices you really want to make. 6/4/2024 0 Comments Help your body birthInformed Birth Planning Knowing how your body works can help you work with it and your baby to feel positive and confident in your birthing decisions and experiences. There's no one type of positive birth. Neither is a positive birth only possible if all your hopes and plans come true exactly as you wish. A birth you can look back on and feel positive about means one where you knew you were supported by those around you and when you were given the chance to make the best fully informed decision for you whatever the circumstances on the day. You can have a positive home water birth, a positive planned c-section birth, a positive hospital labour ward active birth, a positive birth with an epidural, any kind of birth that feels like the right choice for you.
We're called Informed Pregnancy, Birth and Beyond because we want everyone to have access to the information they need to make their own decisions. We're there to support you to make your own decisions we're not interested in telling you what those decisions should be. We often talk about shifting your focus from what is out of your control to what is in your control and how this may help you plan for a positive birth regardless of what's in the news or how hospital policies may change. Now it's time to get practical we've been collecting ideas about what practical activities and ideas can help to raise our positive birthing hormones and help us switch off our worried brains and let our bodies get on with the work of labour and birth. What can we do that is within our control. 6/3/2024 0 Comments Normal for a new parentThe original title of this blog was normal infant behaviour. But as I started to write it I realised that it’s not enough to just know what to expect your baby to be like. As a team when we talked about what we would include in this post many of us reflected on how it feels to be a new parent, especially for the first time. What would we like expectant parents to know? That parenting is hard & however prepared you feel, it will still potentially hit you like a juggernaut. You feel what you feel - There's no such thing as a perfect parent In modern western society, we're often not really used to being around small babies. When you find yourself pregnant, especially for the first time, there’s so much information on what you should and shouldn’t do it can be very overwhelming and feel like you’re being expected to achieve some kind of perfect parent status without any actual practical support.
You might be one of these people to whom parenting seems to come easy, you might have an instant rush of love as soon as your baby is placed in your arms, feeding your baby may go just as you hope, your baby may sleep for a good four hours every time and they may laugh and gurgle on their play mat whenever they're awake. Or any one or all of those things might not happen and that would also be perfectly normal. When we see parenting represented on TV or social media it can seem like there are two extremes. People are either hashtag blessed with a perfect baby and life or they are comically hopeless at everything. But the reality is everyone struggles sometimes. Everyone is trying to find their own way of parenting. It's completely normal to have some amazing moments and some moments when you just want to crawl back into bed and cry. 6/3/2024 0 Comments Making a birth plan"Your birth plan will only end in disappointment." We hear it said so often birth is unpredictable, you can’t plan a birth, making a birth plan is just setting yourself up for disappointment and feeling guilty. But in our experience of working with families, it is precisely because birth is unpredictable that having a birth plan is so important and can often be the thing that prevents feelings of guilt and disappointment. Maybe people don’t like the idea of birth planning because they think making a birth plan means writing down your ideal birth and thinking positively and then all your wishes will come true. If you can plan a holiday you can plan a birth.
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AuthorPosts by team members who are doulas, antenatal teachers, placenta specialists and birth nerds among other things. ArchivesCategoriesAll Birth Birth Plan Mental Health Peer Support Postnatal Postnatal Plan |
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