Doulas Are For Dads Too
Finding out that you are expecting is such an exciting time!!! So many hopes and dreams are born in our minds. We have visions of how we want to bring our babies home, and images of our happy family all snuggled together. As our due date gets closer, we often start to wonder how our birth itself will look. Do we want an unmedicated (“natural”) or medicated birth? How will we handle this experience? How will our partner handle this experience? Who will we have to support us? These are important questions to ask.
We recognize that birth is both beautiful and intense all at the same time. Everyone is aware that labor is… well, labor! Choosing our birth team is an important part of pregnancy. We choose a provider that we trust to keep us safe and can help us achieve our birth goals. We decide where we would like to give birth. Then we think about who we will have to support us physically and emotionally. We want our husbands to be our support person (obviously!) but birth is equally intense for them! It is difficult for partners to see you experience such discomfort. You are their person, and it is hard to see your person go through something as physically and emotionally challenging as birth. They also do not know what is “normal” in a birth space, since they are not regularly attending births. It can be difficult for them to know when they should be concerned or not. As your support person, they feel it is their job to make sure you are as comfortable as possible, advocate for you, help keep you safe, and also tend to your emotional needs. That is a lot for one person to do! Especially a person who is also in the process of experiencing the birth of their child. We often tend to discount the fact that this is an emotional journey for dads too! That is a lot of pressure. We don’t always share the same love language as our partners, and let’s be honest communication is always harder when we are being flooded and overstimulated. A doula can be your interpreter. Your doula is the expert on birth and your husband is the expert on you, together we make a great team.
Deciding to add someone to your birth team for support is a topic that can be tricky for many couples to navigate. You don’t want your spouse to feel like you do not trust them to take care of you. You also want to acknowledge that they carry a lot of responsibility in your birth space and having an additional support person, like a doula, can be an enormous help! The concern for moms is that by suggesting a doula, their husband may feel that he is not good enough. For many dads their fear is of being replaced at their birth, they worry that if there is a doula they will no longer be needed. All of these concerns could not be farther from the truth!
Doulas are not there to replace husbands in your birth. It is our job to provide partners with the tools they need to be the type of support they would like to be in your birth space. It is the goal of a doula to provide dads with information and techniques that will help them support you in a way that will be most helpful throughout your labor. Having an additional support person in the room who knows what birth “looks like” it allows dads to relax a bit and focus more strongly on keeping you comfortable and maintaining your emotional connection. Being new parents is hard! There will be many times throughout your fourth trimester (postpartum period) when things may seem overwhelming. You are all learning so many new things while your hormones are shifting, your body is healing, and you are running on very little sleep. Having positive memories of how you were able to comfort and love each other as a couple, through labor will often be the very thing that you can draw upon to get you through those rough days.
As a doula, every mother that I have supported has been grateful that I was there. Moms say they felt comforted and supported. They also say they felt comforted that their spouse was being supported too. The freedom from having to be a caregiver during their own birth let them relax and focus solely on welcoming their baby into the world. As amazing as it is to hear this feedback from new moms, I ALWAYS hear the highest praise from new dads. Every single partner that I have supported has told me that my help allowed them to be the husband and dad that they always wanted to be during their wife’s labor. As a couple, they are able to take away positive memories of love and support, and the confidence that they can tackle anything together. For me, that is what being a doula is all about.
If you live in the Greater Kansas City area and would like a free consultation to see if I am the right doula to add to your birth team, please fill out my contact form here and we can start our journey together!