The Birth and Coaching Skills You Need

Dear DIYFather-to-be

Take a deep breath then consider your life: work, sports, hobbies, technical expertise even driving a car or knowing how to wash the dishes. All of these require learned skills and then using them.

Think a bit back to when you were 7 or 8 years old and consider how many skills you’ve learned since then … beyond being able to hold your liquor!

We think skills just arrive

Often we’re not even aware of all the skills we’ve learned, practiced, perfected and use. Learning skills can come so easily to some people and in some areas that people don’t recognize how much time they practiced or repeated doing something over and over again in order to become skilled. But skills can be difficult. If schoolwork was not your strength then you know that learning can be a struggle and unsatisfactory. In fact, you know how badly you can feel when you don’t feel skilled, particularly if those skills are expected of you.

Now you’re pregnant … yes, men get pregnant too. Once your baby’s mother gets pregnant you get dragged into all her changes whether physical, emotional or mental. Unfortunately, no one is guiding you as you move through ‘becoming’ a father during pregnancy to ‘being’ one immediately after the birth of your baby. No one is telling you or your baby’s mother how important it is to develop skills:

• To prepare the pregnant body to let out a big object
• To learn, practice and then use skills to work with your baby’s efforts to be born during the process of giving birth.

Skills lead the way

It’s understandable that most New Zealand men identify their primary role as being the provider. If men even think about how you get to being a father, most would just accept a jump into the role after the birth of the baby.

That’s like jumping into the role of ‘being’ a top rugby or cricket player just because the game is starting. What’s the chance of that happening? To ‘be’ a father, you must learn fatherhood qualities and skills to help your baby come out of its mother’s body. Without skills the pregnant woman will give birth one way or another just like a rugby match will go on once started. But you know that how a person plays makes a difference. How you and your pregnant partner ‘do’ the activity of giving birth leaves life long memories.

Birth is a lot like plumbing.

A big 3 dimensional object (your baby) has to come down, through and out of another 3 dimensional body (the woman). For that to happen, the woman’s body must open up. She doesn’t need strong muscles to push the baby out. She needs to open up.

However, the process that takes place inside her body to open (the cervix, pelvis and birth canal) is often accompanied by natural occurring pain. Without coping or pain management skills, its easy for a woman to tense up in reaction to pain.

These are the skills that will help the pregnant woman learn to open up during pregnancy:

• Map the pelvis so you know what plumbing shape your baby has to navigate through.
• Hip Lift … create space in the pelvis side to side.
• Kate’s Cat … keep the sacrum mobile to help ease any back pain caused by pressure from this big object as it makes it’s journey down, through and out and create more space back to front.
• Internal work … how to prepare the birth canal to open up and let a big object pass through so there is no trauma to the woman’s body and your baby comes out promptly.

Then you have to learn the birth and coaching skills:

• 5 Phases of each contractions … know how to work with each phase of increasing and decreasing pain of contractions using one or more of your skills.
• Directed Breathing … how the birthing woman can use her inhalation to open her body and her exhalation to relax inside her body.
• Pelvic Clock … how a woman can soften inside her pelvis
• Communication … verbal and non-verbal skills so you can read and hear exactly when your partner is coping or needs your help.
• Positions … with plumbing in mind, you don’t want the woman to close off her space and hinder the baby’s journey.
• Deep relaxing touch … how to cue your partner to soften in very specific areas of her body.

Preparing a pregnant body and learning birth and coaching skills takes about 12 weeks … sort of the same time it takes to learn to drive a car proficiently. Then you have to use these skills at every moment of the birth process is happening just like you must use one or more skills at every moment you are behind the wheel of your car.

What’s very neat is that New Zealand men are cluey and so very capable. Now is the time to grow skilled families … one expectant father at a time.

For the essential pregnancy and birth skills for both expectant parents go to www.birthingbetter.com and get The Pink Kit Package. The author of this article is Wintergreen, a Trustee to the New Zealand registered charitable Trust called Common Knowledge that produces The Pink Kit Method For Birthing Better®.