Childbirth Education's Real Competition with Ashley Brichter, CEO of Birthsmarter.

What keeps expecting parents from signing up for childbirth education? It isn't necessarily another class. More often, it's the feeling that there simply isn't enough time.

In this episode of the Ask the Doulas Podcast, Kristin Revere sits down with Ashley Brichter, founder and CEO of Birthsmarter, to explore how modern childbirth education must evolve to meet the realities of today's busy families. They discuss why traditional childbirth classes often compete with packed schedules rather than other educators, how to make prenatal education more accessible, and what parents truly need to feel confident heading into labor, birth, and the postpartum period.

Whether you're expecting your first baby or supporting growing families as a birth professional, this conversation offers practical insights into creating realistic, engaging education that empowers parents without overwhelming them.

In this episode, you'll learn:

•  Why time is the biggest barrier to childbirth education 
•  How today's parents consume information differently 
•  What essential topics every childbirth class should cover 
•  Ways to fit birth preparation into a busy schedule 
•  How quality education can improve confidence and birth experiences 

Connect with Ashley Brichter and learn more about Birthsmarter.

If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to the Ask the Doulas Podcast, leave a review, and share it with an expecting parent who could benefit from evidence-based birth education.

This episode is sponsored by Cozy Earth. Use the code GOLDCOAST to receive a discount of up to 20 percent off.

Subscribe to our newsletter, check out Kristin Revere’s birth and baby book, and see more about our doula services & online courses below:

https://linktr.ee/goldcoastdoulas

Transcript

What keeps expecting parents from signing up for childbirth education?  It isn't necessarily another class.  More often, it's the feeling that there simply isn't enough time.

In this episode of the Ask the Doulas Podcast, Kristin Revere sits down with Ashley Brichter, founder and CEO of Birthsmarter, to explore how modern childbirth education must evolve to meet the realities of today's busy families.  They discuss why traditional childbirth classes often compete with packed schedules rather than other educators, how to make prenatal education more accessible, and what parents truly need to feel confident heading into labor, birth, and the postpartum period.

Whether you're expecting your first baby or supporting growing families as a birth professional, this conversation offers practical insights into creating realistic, engaging education that empowers parents without overwhelming them.

In this episode, you'll learn:

•  Why time is the biggest barrier to childbirth education 
•  How today's parents consume information differently 
•  What essential topics every childbirth class should cover 
•  Ways to fit birth preparation into a busy schedule 
•  How quality education can improve confidence and birth experiences 
•  

Connect with Ashley Brichter and learn more about Birthsmarter.

If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to the Ask the Doulas Podcast, leave a review, and share it with an expecting parent who could benefit from evidence-based birth education.

This episode is sponsored by Cozy Earth.  Use the code GOLDCOAST to receive a discount of up to 20 percent off.

Hello, hello!  This is Kristin with Ask the Doulas, and I am thrilled to chat with Ashley Brichter today.  Ashley is the founder and CEO of Birthsmarter, the founder of Plumline, and co-founder of Move Your Marriage.  Ashley is a certified Fair Play facilitator, birth and postpartum doula, and lactation counselor who has worked with families, healthcare professionals, and mission-driving organizations nationwide.  Ashley still pops into the classroom and occasionally teaches all of the Birthsmarter classes.  She lives outside New York City with her son, Emilio, and her daughter, Magdalena, and is rarely off.  If she’s not building a company, she’s probably renovating something, reorganizing something, or dreaming up the next big idea.  Ashley won the 2026 Grazing Board Extraordinaire Fundy awards for bringing small pieces together and making something greater than the sum of their individual parts.  Welcome, Ashley! 

Thank you so much for having me, Kristin!  That bio is…

It’s so different than a lot of other birth and baby professionals’ vision for their business, and you are both virtual and in person, but you have a great newsletter series, and your recent newsletter about how childbirth classes are not competing against each other – because you and I, we both offer similar services – but we’re competing against time.  I would love to dive into that topic if you’re down for it, Ashley! 

I will say about Birthsmarter, and part of why we love collaborating with everybody in the perinatal space, is that so many people who build businesses around support for the perinatal period really offer a lot of what families need.  They’re offering birth doula services and postpartum doula services and lactation and childbirth ed and all of that.  And Birthsmarter, over the last almost 10 years, has really niched down into the education space.  I was an educator before anything else, before I entered the birth world, and so that’s where my passion lies is in curriculum and pedagogy and designing course work, actually.  And I get to do it in a place that I really care about, which is where people are becoming parents.  But I feel like I set out in the early 2000s to market on behalf of childbirth education.  That was my mission.  I think it’s really important that people are taking classes, and how do we figure out how to get that word out so that it’s not like an outdated concept? 

And we are competing not only against time, but I find that with YouTube and TikTok and social media, people feel like they can get their education from a short video.  But nothing replaces a comprehensive class that involves the couple as a whole over just reading a book or watching a TikTok about comfort measures for labor, for example. 

Yeah, I think it really depends on someone’s starting place.  What we were trying to articulate is that when you’re pregnant, especially for the very first time, you don’t know what you don’t know.  And if you grow up in a community that has an innate trust in birth, you might think, well, I’m pregnant, and everybody gets pregnant, and then they all go and they have their babies.  Maybe it’s just going to be fine.  Or if you have kind of inherent fears and insecurities, you might think, well, I’m working with my doctor and I’m really nervous, and I just want to trust them, and I don’t want to know anything else.  I don’t want to know more than I need to know because it’s going to make me feel worried.  And in either of those camps, childbirth education doesn’t seem particularly attractive.  And when you’re pregnant, there’s a bombardment of tasks that build up on the to-do list.  Your weekends very quickly getting eaten up, especially when you are in the window where a comprehensive class makes sense, which is typically between 28 and 34 weeks.  

So what’s hard is before anybody in our space can say everybody should just be out here saying, hold on, there are some things that you really need to know in order to have this experience go well, and the way we talk about it is ensuring that it’s not outcome oriented.  It’s not about unlocking the goal of having an unmedicated vaginal birth necessarily.  In my mind, that’s not the best use of time because it can lead to a lot of disappointment when plans change.  We call it the pregnant opportunity.  Having a baby is a time when you can learn about stress management.  You can learn about anatomy and physiology.  You can learn about your posture and your alignment.  You can learn about interacting with a big medical system.  You can really get to know your partner in a totally different way and figure out how you guys want to communicate with each other physically, verbally, and nonverbally.  And all of those lessons serve you in your life – in postpartum, in parenting, and work.  And so that’s really where we’re coming from. 

And the fact that you’re a Fair Play facilitator probably leads your custom classes to involve a lot of partner communication and much more than, say, a typical HypnoBirthing class or Lamaze would have? 

Partner support is part of every single lesson that we’re teaching.  What we do at Birthsmarter is difference in the approach we take around partners.  We teach partners not because they’re supporting someone who’s giving birth.  We teach partners because they’re there becoming parents.  And the experience of being in a stressful environment where there are doctors or midwives or nurses, doulas, where there’s sweat; there’s moisture; there’s sounds – all of that for a human being waiting for their baby to be born is a lot, and they deserve the education and the preparation and the emotional and physical support in order to stay kind of regulated, right, through that experience in order to welcome their baby. 

Of course, we’re teaching partners the hip squeeze and we’re teaching partners how to do some breath coaching and all of that for the person in labor, but we also are taking a bird’s-eye view and saying, wait, you are important for your own sake, and we are going to teach you what you need to know to be successful and how to transfer labor and delivery into the postpartum experience.  So it’s a little bit of the modern day take on what the Bradley method really offered us, which is partners are clutch.  And Fair Play was a system for dividing the domestic loan, the mental load, between adults in a home, and saying, hey, I don’t want to be responsible for thinking about and executing all of the things that make our life wonderful.  We need to really share the load here.  And so we take that approach to dishes and laundry and planning vacations, and we apply it to labor prep and postpartum. 

I love involving the partner as much as possible, and I agree, it’s more than just the hip squeezes and physical support.  It’s the whole process of becoming a parent, whether it’s baby one or baby five.  Every birth is different.  Every situation.  Clients may be attempting a VBAC, a vaginal birth after Cesarean, for example, so they would prepare differently than a student who is having a home birth, for example.  

Childbirth education as an offering is still fairly new in human history.  It only really became popular in the 1940s.  Some classes were a little bit earlier, but there was a real response to the turn of the century, bringing birth into the hospital in the United States, and then using twilight sleep, which became really popular in the early 1900s.  Childbirth education was really from some European philosophies, the idea that birth – we can go back.  Birth doesn’t have to be super painful.  It doesn’t have to be super scary.  It doesn’t have to be super medicalized.  And if we teach you a little bit about what it’s like ahead of time, we can counter this kind of growing fear in the United States around the experience.  And the movement of early Lamaze classes and then early Bradley Method classes was hugely successful. 

Exactly.  My parents took Lamaze when they were pregnant with me in the mid-70s, and I ended up taking it not once with back to back babies but twice, because I’m a type A and felt like the education was worth it.  But also getting my husband to remember a lot of the comfort measures, even though I had doulas the second time around – I still wanted to prepare in that way.  And I also loved the bonding of an in-person class and made so many fantastic friends who were going through the same thing at the same time as me.  We ended up having outings, and I’m still in touch with friends from both of my Lamaze classes.  

The top, if not top three, reasons people take an in-person class is to try to meet other folks who are pregnant, or even if you’re not going to be friends with them, to see other pregnant people, to normalize pregnancy and to hear the questions they’re asking and to see how couples are interacting with each other.  There’s so much learning that comes from those unspoken group dynamics.  And I think it just can help put you at ease because especially.  We teach a ton of people who are pregnant for the first time, and they’re the first of their friend group to get pregnant.  And they feel really lonely.  I think that to some extent, when I talk to folks if they’ve called to book a class at Birthsmarter – I think Lamaze has become like the Kleenex of childbirth education.  It’s so the biggest name that folks will call us all the time and they’re like, I need a Lamaze class.  Is that what you do?  And it’s like, well, no.  I’m not Lamaze certified.  We actually do have Lamaze certified educators at Birthsmarter who did the three-day or week-long training with Lamaze and then they did our longer training and wanted to teach the Birthsmarter curriculum, but it was like, if we break down, here’s what Lamaze is; here’s what Lamaze is offering.  Lamaze is offering a kind of agnostic approach to teaching you your options when it comes to labor and delivery in a group setting with other pregnant people.  Like, yeah, that’s exactly what we offer.  So it’s just a different brand of tissue.  And HypnoBirthing is going to be really similar, and then there are people who are just individuals in their community who have kind of created their own beautiful things that they find valuable.  Maybe there’s a little bit more inspiration from yoga poses.  Maybe there’s a little bit more mindfulness and meditation.  Maybe there’s a little bit more about a specific hospital or a VBAC, like you said.  Best case scenario is the individuals or couples are saying, what we’re going to do is dedicate a day or two days or a few evenings three or four or five weeks in a row to just taking a breath together. 

Right.  And a lot of childbirth classes also cover the birth plan or birth preference sheet and understanding potential interventions and understanding what your body is doing, not only in the stages of labor, but also in pregnancy.  And so there’s so much more than just the basic prepping for pushing, for example. 

There’s pelvic floor therapy.  I think it’s critical for almost everybody.  Not everybody, but almost everybody who’s pregnant or postpartum should try to find pelvic floor therapy in their area.  It’s changed my life.  It’s changed so many people’s lives, and I know I am much stronger years after having a baby now because I really know how my core and pelvic floor work together and I can keep my back safe.  I can keep my hips safe.  All of these things.  That said, there are a lot of people who are in the pelvic floor therapy world who are teaching more and more birth preparation courses.  That’s what they call it, and they do these series on social media about birth preparation.  And they are very specifically talking about, hey, we’re going to teach you how to connect with your pelvic floor so that your pelvic floor has a lower likelihood of tearing during the pushing phase of birth.  And that’s important, and that is not comprehensive childbirth education, and it’s really hard to get that nuance across in ten seconds on social media. 

100% agree.  I’m so glad that you mentioned that because, yeah, it is so different.  And there’s the body ready method and a lot about alignment, but that is different than a comprehensive childbirth class. 

When folks are coming to us, they are getting a framework for how to make decisions in the moment.  We really prioritize what we call the Birthsmarter framework, which is there’s no one right way to do this.  We’re going to teach you about the physiological process.  We’re going to teach you about the societal context.  We’re going to teach you how to think about your own personal circumstances so that you’re not comparing yourselves to people out there making different decisions, right, because everybody is a little bit different.  We go over the BRAIN acronym, which is important for everybody’s who pregnant.  So if you’re faced with if it’s time to get an epidural, should we be induced, are they going to break my water – what are the benefits?  What are the risks?  What are the alternatives?  What does your instinct or intuition tell you?  Do we have to do that now, or do I have more time?  That is something that is not unique to Birthsmarter.  Most childbirth education classes are covering things like that to say, okay, how can I kind of slow down and think about this, but then we’re also giving you some history.  Like, yeah, sure, we want to think about the stages of labor.  Absolutely, it’s important to understand progression.  But if birth can look so many different ways, for us at Birthsmarter, it’s like really physiologically explaining why things happen.  So we are constantly referencing the fact that oxytocin, our love/trust/bonding hormone, that’s the trigger for contractions.  That means that we have to feel safe in order for the labor process to start and then continue.  We want contractions to come.  We want them to get longer, stronger, closer together.  And that is driven by essentially a pleasure hormone.  If we’re scared and tense, that that’s counterproductive.  So we do the physiology lesson in a way that explains why breath, why comfort measures, why self-advocacy, why choosing the right provider, why potentially having a midwife – why those are potentially really important choices.  When you go into certain classes and they’re like, okay, well, here’s the hip squeeze and here’s how to do a slow dance, and you should hire a doula – people don’t understand why physiologically how that might impact the hormones of labor.  It’s not going to stick as well two months down the road when they actually have their first contraction. 

So true.  And yeah, if they take it earlier in pregnancy and they don’t practice at home, then it’s all gone.  There might be a little worksheet or workbook, but it’s not the same. 

Well, it’s interesting because somebody did ask me that last week, actually.  They were like, how early can I take a class?  And I think just because Birthsmarter has grown – we are teaching many more people than I did when I started teaching.  I taught one class every month, and I had anywhere between 9 and 12 couples in it.  At the end of the year, I was like, I can’t believe I taught 150 couples!  That’s awesome!  And now we’re teaching 150, 200 couples a month, and it’s like, oh, my God, that’s a lot of people that we’re educating!  It’s really fun.  It’s such an honor to be part of people’s lives in this way, but we get to see so many more people, Kristin.  We had a couple come to class, and all of the teachers were crying at our team meeting.  They were in the fertility journey.  She hasn’t been able to get pregnant for two years.  She’s doing another round of IVF, and somebody – I don’t know who – somebody said why don’t you go to a birth class.  Why don’t you sit in a room full of pregnant people and soak up the good vibes?  And she did, and we were like, this is the first time we’ve ever taught a couple who’s not currently pregnant.  And then a few months ago, I popped into a class to rearrange props in the classroom, and there was a couple in there, and they had just hit the 12-week mark.  They got a good anatomy scan at 12 weeks.  And she was like, I’m so anxious.  I’m taking this class now and then I’m watching the on-demand class later, but I need to know what I’m walking into.  Wow.  And when we have people literally due three days after class because they’re like, somebody just told me about it, so we’re coming in and we’re going to just take what we can.  But to your point about practice, the first thing is, take a class whenever you can fit it in.  And earlier is better because you can always refresh yourself, but it’s never too late.  And then we say this all the time: you labor how you live.  Right?  And you will not use what you do not practice.  So come to class to practice breathing, to get into some positions, to understand why it’s important.  And then the work is putting it on your calendar.  It’s both having 20-minute practice sessions but also adjusting your habits.  We want everybody to throw their breakfast chair at the kitchen table in the garbage and put the birth ball right there, so when you wake up in the morning and you’re sitting to eat breakfast or you’re working on your computer from home, you’re just sitting on the birth ball.  You don’t have to go get the birth ball out to practice labor positions.  The ball just becomes part of your life.  It becomes part of how you watch TV.  It becomes how you move around.  Going for micro movement breaks, what you’re eating, staying hydrated – all of these things.  Breathing when you get really stressed.  This is what we want you to practice throughout the day to really integrate it into how your body functions. 

I love it!  And the pregnancy practice is legit.  We offer HypnoBirthing at Gold Coast Doulas, which is very much focused on evening rituals, relaxation, mindfulness, and partner involvement.  We find that our students take it earlier in pregnancy, but they also are committing to practicing.  We’ll occasionally get some closer to the due date that feel rushed, but I agree that it’s not just about taking a comprehensive class.  It’s also about practicing breathing and the labor positions and the communication and understanding how to optimize what your body is doing at every stage in labor. 

I do think that if people are on the fence about, can we sacrifice the time – sometimes it’s the money, but I think there are many low-cost options out there.  We have alternative pricing on all of our classes, so people just fill out a form on our website and they can take a class for as little as $25.  I know there are other local classes who will offer scholarships and things like that.  So sometimes people think money is an issue.  Often there’s actually insurance coverage or HSA coverage.  So I feel like we can make the finances work, and that’s why – that’s the newsletter I wrote.  It really is time.  What I want to say to your point about those nightly meditations is I want people to take it out of, “This is homework we have to do.  This feels like another thing we have to add to our list, something we have to check off.”  And actually, if you’re taking a valuable class, like a class that people in your community have been like, “Yes, this was super worth it,” and you want those people to have had a vaginal birth, had an induction, had a C‑section – like, no matter how the baby comes out, universally, people are like, no, no, the class was still helpful.  It’s because what you’re learning in that class is going to help you be a better person.  Like, what I want to remember from classes I took that had HypnoBirthing elements to it when I was pregnant is if I’m feeling kind of rattly, I want to go and put on a meditation.  That is a helpful skill for me, right?  And how can I have the metaphor of, oh, I’m about to have a baby; I’m doing something really hard – how does that apply when I’m physically sick, if I have the flu or I have food poisoning?  I’m like, hey, I’m going to use all these strategies.  The funniest example I give people sometimes – but if you’re not a parent already, it doesn’t track – I’ve used all of my doula skills potty training my kids.  All of the times that you just have to sit with them when they’re learning how to have a bowel movement on the toilet, and you’re like, it’s okay if it takes a long time.  You’re fine.  You’re going to just let your body rest.  We’re just going to sit here and breathe through it. 

It is just like being a birth doula!  I love it. 

It’s like learning how to sit with discomfort and physical and emotional discomfort.  We all need that right now to live, to cope with the world.  I don’t know.  I’m such a birth class junkie because you learn such cool stuff that’s not about, “This is where the ice machine is.”  And that’s something to say.  I don’t know about your experience in your area, but definitely in New York City, there are some teachers in the hospitals who teach a really great birth class, but in general, a lot of it is, here’s how you can be a good patient, and here’s kind of what you need to know about the lay of the land in the hospital.  The hospital classes themselves are a little hit or miss. 

I agree.  For us, it depends on the hospital.  But it’s more about how to be a patient and understand the policies and procedures.  It’s more generalized for the average patient than for the unique goals of every couple. 

It’s so interesting because you mentioned a VBAC versus a homebirth.  Childbirth education can be somewhat geared to your environment.  But there are some universal elements.  I don’t know; I just think that – oh, also the other point I will say about it, and I don’t know if you hear this because you match people with doulas – people who are like, oh, I don’t need a birth class because I’m hiring a doula. 

Oh, yes.  It’s so frustrating.  You need the classes!  It’s like if you think that if you hire a lactation consultant, for example, that you don’t need to take a breastfeeding class.  But having the partner understand how to support and having that practice with holds pre-baby when your brain can absorb the information versus after baby is there and you’re stressed out and exhausted.  So I believe that it’s not one or the other; it can be both, or if you don’t have the budget for a birth doula, I’m always leaning more towards the childbirth education and supporting the partner. 

Yeah, 100%.  And one of the things that we’ve been really excited to see recently is a number of doulas in New York City – we do most of our in-person classes in New York City and Salt Lake City, and we have a few teachers scattered around the country in other locations who teach occasionally.  And then we offer classes virtually.  But in New York City, there are a number of doulas who now have written into their package that they will only work with Birthsmarter students because it’s like, we just need to speak the same language, and it’s much easier.  They take the class, and then they do the first prenatal visit.  And at the prenatal visit, they kind of go over everything.  They make it much more personalized.  And that’s the happiest marriage for us because we can do a one-day intensive class, and then you go and you bring your doula any questions that you didn't get answered because we’re not doing an eight-week series.  And then they have their second visit, and it’s like everybody’s on the same page when they go into labor and delivery.  And that’s been really awesome to see how doulas love working with clients who have the education, and they’re not putting all that pressure on that first prenatal visit with a doula to be like, okay, well, teach me everything I need to know. 

Exactly.  When I was a new doula, I used to give $100 off to my clients who took a comprehensive childbirth class because it made my job so much easier.  They didn't have to choose just the class I taught.  It could be any class, Bradley, whatever.  Because we know that they’re going to go into it more prepared, and my prenatal visits are not going to be as education-focused.  It’s more about getting to know them and their goals.  So as a doula, I’m certainly for whatever choices families make, but I try to steer them towards childbirth education. 

It’s funny.  Yeah, we all show up and try to be incredibly nonjudgmental, and here’s the one area where we’re like, yeah, but this is really important!  But of course, we’re being judgmental about learning your options, right, not about choosing an option.  We also love when doulas come audit our classes.  Doulas anywhere are invited to audit our virtual classes or in-person classes if anybody’s in the area.  And that’s a really nice way, too, because there are incredible doulas out there, just like there are incredible birth educators out there, but there is a high burnout rate because it’s an incredibly challenging profession.  And so for newer doulas, they might not really know the value of childbirth education.  And the best way to learn, I think, is to just come and sit in on a class and see what they’re learning and what parents are asking.  And I would encourage any doula also to kind of audit the options in their local community so that they can make a really good recommendation. 

That’s a good point, Ashley, and I know when I went through my two birth doula certifications, they both required me to audit a comprehensive childbirth class.  But there are so many more training organizations now, and many of them do not require that. 

Many of them do not.  Nope. 

Such a shame, because it’s so important to have that additional education.  Doula trainings don’t teach you everything you need to know.  And also to be able to realize the differences between the different childbirth classes and how to meet the goals and understand what your clients want to take from each class.  So if a doula doesn’t understand HypnoBirthing or Birthsmarter or Bradley, then how can they truly support how the client has prepared? 

And it goes back to exactly the same thing we’re saying about being pregnant, which is that for better or worse, we are all kind of consumers at this point in our country.  We’re consumers of medical treatment.  We’re consumers of information.  Part of being a consumer is really understanding what the options are and understanding how to get the right fit.  It’s totally different if you live in a tiny community that has one midwife and you know you’re too far from a hospital and you’re going to have a homebirth and somebody’s had a ton of babies around you.  That’s just what happens.  The midwife in the area comes to you, which is how a lot of humans were born in the past.  And that’s not how most of us live now.  Most of us live in a city with a few major hospitals.  Maybe there’s a birth center.  There’s some homebirth midwives.  And it can feel overwhelming.  And I think one of the things I want to say: I understand as a human how avoidance is a way of coping with overwhelm.  I’m not sure what to do, so I’m going to do nothing.  And I just don’t want people who are pregnant to have to make that choice because there are folks like you and I who would happily help.  I don’t charge for consults because we don’t sell doulas.  We don’t match doula services, right?  So if somebody calls me and they were like, hey, I’m trying to decide between this class and this class, and in order for me to help them choose, we have to have a 45-minute conversation about their hopes and fears – we would have that 45-minute conversation because we’re still a very small company.  And there are so many people who go into birth work to have those conversations with people without charging them.  We can almost get everybody who’s in that avoidance place and that overwhelmed place to feeling confident in making an action-oriented decision. 

Right.  This has been an amazing conversation!  I wish we could keep going!  Any final tips for our listeners, Ashley? 

Take a birth class if you’re pregnant.  Take it as early as possible, but it’s never too late.  Find a class that you can afford.  Look up the reviews or ask around.  Everybody should come take a class, whether you’re a doula or a physical therapist or if you work with pregnant people.  You should come take childbirth ed because I think we really are understanding doulas and midwives are essential pieces of the puzzle when it comes to solving the maternal health crisis in the United States, and childbirth education is, also.  We all need to be talking about  it. 

Agreed!  Where can our listeners and doula clients find you? 

We’re very easy to find.  It’s Birthsmarter.com.  We’re @birthsmarter on Instagram.  We do have a small YouTube channel that’s got some old content on it, but it’s all really good.  We’re not on TikTok yet.  And I’m just ashley@birthsmarter.com.  Folks can always email me or reach out to anybody else on our small team.  We are all parents and all very accessible. 

And as you mentioned, Ashley, you have not only in-person classes in Salt Lake City and New York and some select cities around the country, but also virtual options so no matter where you live, you have the opportunity to take the different formats that you offer? 

Yeah, absolutely.  Our on-demand class is over eight hours of content.  It’s a comprehensive childbirth class with full lessons around postpartum preparedness.  We also offer Newborn Care and a Lactation Prep class on Zoom, which is really nice because we have the accountability of a time and a date and an instructor, and you get to hear from other people who are pregnant, but you don’t have to leave your house.  And we do a one-day class on Zoom, as well, for people who want that accountability but they want to do it for childbirth education.  And we’re incredibly flexible.  We do private classes all the time if you just want three hours with an instructor.  All of our classes come with a ton of online resources on our account and a really beautiful workbook that you get to keep with you and write everything down and remember it.  They’re really fun.  Birthsmarter has hit the point where it’s engaging and it’s fun.  It’s a little bit entertaining, and you’re going to remember what you learned a few years down the road. 

Well, I love the work that you’re doing.  Thank you for the impact you’re making in this space.  We’ll have to have you on again, Ashley! 

Thank you so much for having me!  I loved being here!

IMPORTANT LINKS

Birthsmarter

Birth and postpartum support from Gold Coast Doulas

Becoming A Mother course

Buy our book, Supported