I do not tell you what you should have on your Birth Plan, but I do make sure things are worded powerfully so there are no loop-holes to lessen your rights as Pregnant People and set you up to be manipulated
by the looming Male Medical Model of Maternity Care.
An Excting Blog Facts to Consider:
Telling Isn’t Teaching
The difference between my classes and institutional childbirth classes is that I connect childbearing directly to my students through my TEACHING styles*. Institutionalized childbirth courses, led by nurses (not necessarily certified childbirth educators) show PowerPoint slides while reading the captions.
This is not TEACHING. That is TELLING.
TELLING is not TEACHING. Telling people “Stuff about Childbirth” does not empower expectant learners.
*I use storytelling, analogies, and Humorparables as a part of my format for childbearing and breastfeeding education. The normal birthing world (believers in spontaneous labors with no unnecessary interventions) has discovered what really happens
in normal childbearing.
Many of my students search the internet and/or come to me though personal referral. They have started learning some of these truths. However,most of those wanting childbirth classes don’t seek quality
because they do not know the difference.
Institutional classes are the ones who give quality childbirth education a bad name as they are described as boring and “nothing helped in labor.
”
Storytelling, colorful/life-sized analogies, and humorous parables align two seemingly different concepts side-by-side to create lessons that will be
far-better remembered due to this teaching method.
I use them because the lay public, and even the “accomplished” medical community members have not heard the truth about NORMAL pregnancy, labor, birth and breastfeeding; much less contemplated or
accepted these truths about childbearing.
Storytelling, analogies, and parables are effective because those lessons contribute to connection between the learner and the lesson. That connection can build confidence in learners and help bring change to others when the learner repeats the lesson truths
with their own storytelling.
Thus, Each one, teach one, is also
a very effective teaching tool.
EXAMPLE:
During the break at a Lesson #1 of my Lamaze Series, a couple came to me with their story. They told me that the previous Sunday at church they told a group of their friends that they would not be at church for the next 6 Sundays because they were taking their childbirth class. One of t heir friend, a woman from Tonga, asked what a childbirth class was. My couple explained that a childbirth class is a class to teach them how to have a baby. The Tongan woman asked: “Why would you need a class to teach you how to have a baby?”
A good question from a woman from a culture where women’s journeys from infant to child, to maiden, to mother, to crone (wise elder), are honored. Women in honorable cultures do not grow up afraid of everything including childbearing. Elders reveal the truths in the mysteries of all of life.
American women are honored for little at all. Fear is perpetuated in America about things that are not so much real mysteries in eyes-open, hearts open, minds open cultures.
*Storytelling, analogies and parables are not my only teaching formats. They are carefully laced among other media forms to balance the needs of my students who include visual, auditory/verbal, reading/writing, aural, social, solitary, logical, and Kinesthetic learners.
If YOU are not having fun in class,
we should be at the beach!
