The Ordinary Doula Podcast
Welcome to The Ordinary Doula Podcast with Angie Rosier, hosted by Birth Learning. We help folks prepare for labor and birth with expertise coming from 20 years of experience in a busy doula practice, helping thousands of people prepare for labor, providing essential knowledge and tools for positive and empowering birth experiences.
The Ordinary Doula Podcast
E61: Childbirth and Parenthood Intuition
The episode explores the evolution of childbirth education and the paradox of having more access to information yet often feeling less intuitive as parents. It encourages listeners to reconnect with their inner wisdom, emphasizes the importance of human connection, and reminds them to trust themselves in their parenting journey.
• Discussion on the decline in childbirth education attendance and class structure
• Examination of the impact of social media on parental knowledge and intuition
• Importance of deep learning versus shallow information consumption
• The role of technology and apps in altering parenting instincts
• Encouragement to trust one’s own intuition and build connections with others
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Show Credits
Host: Angie Rosier
Music: Michael Hicks
Photographer: Toni Walker
Episode Artwork: Nick Greenwood
Producer: Gillian Rosier Frampton
Voiceover: Ryan Parker
Welcome to the Ordinary Doula Podcast with Angie Rozier, hosted by Birth Learning, where we help prepare folks for labor and birth with expertise coming from 20 years of experience in a busy doula practice Helping thousands of people prepare for labor, providing essential knowledge and tools for positive and empowering birth experiences.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to the Ordinary Doula Podcast. My name is Angie Rozier and I am so glad to be with you here today. Not sure what time it is when you're listening to this, what time of the season or the year it is, but when I'm recording it we're right in between Christmas and New Year's, kind of a wonky week. I love this week. Kids aren't in school, some people get a little time off work, there's some good jammy days, there's some good activity days. Hope that, wherever you find yourself during this time of year or when you're listening to this, but you're enjoying your time. Some people are very busy this time of year.
Speaker 2:I've got a good amount of work stacked up to do as well and doing appointments and working at the hospital and things had a couple of great births in December, several of them, a couple of them. It was kind of interesting. They came right together. I think I've never had this happen before. Well, maybe I have, but I had two births on the same day in the same hospital, right next door to each other, which was pretty remarkable. I helped with one. It was a set of twins, stayed with them for several hours, got the babies. You know, the babies were born, got them latched, doing really well, and I knew my client other client was right next door but in contact with her all day. She was doing well, didn't need anything yet, and as soon as I was wrapping up with the twins, that other client said okay, I think I'm ready for you. So I dashed out to my car, got a quick snack washed up between, went right back in and did another great delivery. So that was kind of fun. Maybe there was babies born on, did another great delivery. So that was kind of fun. Maybe there was babies born on Christmas or Christmas Eve. That's always kind of exciting too. All right, so today I want to talk about something that is interesting, kind of an interesting phenomenon I've seen over the years and something that's kind of important to me. It's kind of near and dear to my heart. As I've worked with people over a couple of decades now. I've seen some shifts in people and in just the way people are, how people get their information, how people tune in and tap into information. So childbirth education I think I've mentioned this before on here.
Speaker 2:Childbirth education has decreased in the United States quite dramatically over the last 10-20 years where the rates are going down and the availability of childbirth classes are different than they used to be. We had a few decades of Lamaze classes, hospital-based classes, and those grew. We gained hypnobirthing, hypnobabies. There's been Bradley for a long time too, and a lot of these classes were series. Right, they were like long series, anywhere from four to seven to 12 weeks long, where you would meet for two or three hours a week at your instructor's home or place of you know wherever the class was meeting. Sometimes it was a business, sometimes it was a hospital, but they were a time commitment over a period of weeks, and that has changed a lot.
Speaker 2:People don't commit that much time to their education. They don't wanna be gone that much. It's difficult to get out and you know, depending on whatever your barriers are, to get out at a consistent level. When I see classes now in hospital or privately, they're much shorter in duration. They might be a four-week class, two hours at a time, two and a half, but we don't have those long seven, 10, 12-week courses anymore.
Speaker 2:So but that could be okay, because people are coming to class with a lot more information than they used to. They watch videos, they see Instagram reels and posts and TikTok videos. So they get and all of these are, of course, short snippets of information. There's a lot of information out there. There's a lot of influencers who are doing content surrounding specific topics. So you might look very specifically at a few things. You might have a couple of favorite sources that people get a lot of their information from. So they come to a class a lot farther along than their cohorts did 10, 20, 30 years ago. They do know what a cervix is. They know what a placenta is and what it does. They, you know, know what the uterus is Like. Some of the sometimes these were the first times people were hearing these words or had heard them in a long time. But these are. You know, we're getting a lot more information more quickly. However, the deep dive isn't as deep. We get little. We just skim the surface a lot of times. So we're not getting into spending that deeper time learning from an expert which is your childbirth education teacher or your influencer, like when you're getting online information from social media. You're not. There is some reaction time, right, there's, you can make comments, things like that, but you're not getting that eye to eye contact that. Ask a question, get it answered. Let's have a discussion, let's hear from others in the group in real time about their experiences or their feelings on things. So the education is just different. People have more information but maybe less deep information.
Speaker 2:I've recently sat in on and participated in some hospital classes as well and they're like four week series right now and I love, even in four weeks, the camaraderie that develops within that class as people leave there, or first night. They're exchanging numbers, they're connecting that way, and I used to participate a lot with a longtime childbirth educator who was very, very amazing in our part of the world and had actually taught a couple generations of people and she had big full classes they met for for, I think, for six weeks, for three hours at a time, I believe it was, and so many of those little groups there might be 12 couples there left being friends. They would oftentimes carry on to some extent a long-term friendship as they were all kind of doing the same thing at the same time had, you know, a basis of familiarity and we carry that on to oh, how's your baby doing? Tell us about your birth? Um, let's meet, you know, for walks on the weekend and, and so these. They develop friendships that way and good connection. So connection, connection is sometimes missing, that that more inhuman connection, um, in person and human contact connection.
Speaker 2:But not to say that there's not a lot of great information out there. People are becoming smarter, for sure, which is awesome, but what kind of the meat of what I want to get to? I'm going to call it intuition. I have seen this change in time and there has been little discussions about it, for sure, throughout the country, as childbirth classes have diminished and as we help people I, you know, help a lot of people before birth, during birth, after birth, the new stages of parenting, breastfeeding, sleep situations, nighttime parenting, all the whole package right.
Speaker 2:There has been a shift in and it's nobody's fault, it's just where we are. It's what we're dealing with a shift in intuition. So while people have a lot more information, there's a lot lower level of self trust. So the intuition that people have generally led out with for generations, for decades, for centuries, for millennia, that intuition is a little bit fuzzy right now and there's a few theories why? Some of those theories are that people having babies today, those people, whether they're 20, 30, 40, however old they are, they have had a long time in their life, some of them their entire life, where they've had a handheld device that they could ask anything to. So they could just, you know, I wonder how? You know what? What does the cervix do? Tap it into your phone. You've got, you know, a multitude of responses to that and you know, like here's, here's, here's what we found about that on the internet, on social media. So you're going to get a lot of information quickly. So they learn a lot, but they don't feel a lot.
Speaker 2:Perhaps they don't spend that time inside, they don't spend any time wondering and they want to know. They want to know now. They want to know fast. We can get fast facts Hopefully they're facts, right. We can get fast information. There's fast facts. Hopefully they're facts, right. We can get fast information. There's fast fashion. There's fast facts. We don't have to wonder about anything. We don't have to spend any kind of amount of time, which now we find uncomfortable, like wondering is no longer acceptable. But wondering leads to pondering, which leads to self-reflection, which leads to internal resolutions and solutions, which affects external actions, right.
Speaker 2:So because we don't spend, we're not comfortable spending any time wondering and just thinking about anything, like who was the 20th president of the United States, like I have no idea. I'd have to sit and think about that. I think I know who the 13th was. I can go and go a little beyond that. I I know who like about when Teddy Roosevelt was president. Maybe I could do some deducing there. So just a random history fact right, where we could kind of use our own brain and pattern of thought and taking what we do know to find out what we want to know. That's a silly little example.
Speaker 2:But take that into parenting. Take that into how you want your labor to be, who you want your support to be. How long is your labor going to be? When is your labor going to start? What is parenting going to be like? Will breastfeeding be easy? Are you going to like it? None of those answers are going to be on our handheld devices. Those are things we do have to spend time pondering. We can take those fast facts right, we can take all that fast information and weed through it, but we still need to spend the time pondering.
Speaker 2:So I see a lack of not in everyone for sure. There's still a very deep vein, a very deep thread that's phenomenal to me in women of I don't know like ancestral tapping, tapping like people can get deep into the roots of just being a human being, a woman and so many of my clients say people have been doing this for thousands of years. Women have been doing this for thousands of years. We know how to do it, which is so true. My family, my, my grandmothers, my great grandmas, my aunties, whoever that is they can tap into their own immediate surroundings of feminine strength and history and worldwide, right Just historically, on an anthropological level, as a human being. So that's deep and strong. However, the trust factors. A lot of people, I see, don't trust themselves. They don't trust that they know how to do this. See, don't trust themselves. They don't trust that they know how to do this. They don't trust, they don't tap into their intuition because they've never had to spend very much time wondering about things.
Speaker 2:A lot of times, when I'm helping someone in the postpartum period, I'll ask about their baby how's your baby doing? How's your baby sleeping? How's your baby pooping? How's your baby eating whatever? How's your baby pooping? How's your baby eating, whatever that is? How are you feeling about you? Know this parenting thing. How are you feeling in general? How are you recovering?
Speaker 2:And so many people, in response to that, will look at their phone. They'll pull up an app on their phone and there are some incredible tools out there, incredible apps that will help you track contractions. They help you track your pregnancy right See what your baby's doing, how your baby's growing this week, this month and afterwards. When does your baby eat? When does your baby sleep? Where's their baby's rhythmic, like they can find the rhythms of their breathing and their heart. There's all kinds of monitors and apps and tools that can monitor every single thing about that baby. I've seen people pull up you know you can get a lot of data They'll pull up a little spreadsheet and show me the sleep cycles of their baby. We get averages and sleep duration and when's their longest sleep cycle and when did they eat. How many ounces a day are they getting? When are they getting it? How many poops a day? All important, but we it's interesting when you ask somebody about their baby, they look at their phone.
Speaker 2:So my, my, I guess my encouragement to you, my, is to to help any parent, mother, father, any kind of parent, to realize, even without those apps, even without those tools, you can tap in to what you intuitively know and you can trust it. You know these things. This is your baby, it's your body. You have a lot to do with it. You have this awesome like, this huge connection. It's like a lifeline to this baby that nobody else will have.
Speaker 2:As I help people at nighttime or daytime for postpartum work, it just blows me away. Even first-time parents, even with a three or four-day-old baby, if I go to help them, so I'm helping them at night, they're going to tell me what to expect and they are exactly right. They have gotten to know their baby, their baby's rhythms, their baby's needs quite quickly. Now, that doesn't happen for everyone, but it does happen eventually for everyone. Um, for those who like invest but I love how, how parents it's there. I can still see it, even if parents don't feel it. It absolutely is still there.
Speaker 2:And there's one thing that every single little baby, um, I studied some child development a couple years ago and we got to study some of the greats in that industry and one of them I watched a lecture from the 1970s I think it was 1976. And he said what every single child needs. Okay, we can talk about babies. What every baby needs is someone, at least one person, who is irrationally crazy about them so that only can come from someone with that biological or intuitive or and it doesn't have to be biological but that lifeline to that baby. That's generally a parent right. Usually it's the mom. It can easily be the dad. Those close caregivers, regardless of how good they are, how professional they are, how trained, how well experienced they are, are not as wildly irrationally crazy about that baby as a parent is.
Speaker 2:So my, my, my plea to you is to trust your intuition. It is there. Maybe it's a little fuzzy, maybe we aren't practiced at tapping in to our internal thoughts. How do I feel about this? What do I think about this? What do I want about this? And you know what you might not know yet. Spend some time wondering. Spend some days as you're with a newborn. Spend some days thinking about that, trying on different things, making little experiments as you go.
Speaker 2:Parenting is a huge, you know. Experiment is what it is. You try things, see if they work, make adjustments as needed. This is a great, gigantic scientific experiment raising children and it starts, of course, with pregnancy, birth, babies and breastfeeding Great training ground for the experiment of parenthood. But trust yourself, know that you do have what it takes. Look internal, stay internal for some period of time till you get some answers from you. Those are going to be your very best answers, I promise. I promise you are the expert on you and on your baby.
Speaker 2:With that said, I want to end with what I always end with go out and make a human connection, and maybe today that human connection is you. Human connection is so important. When we spend time with others, when we spend time in their physical proximity, their emotional proximity, that's when some incredible magic happens. So do that with yourself. Spend time in their physical proximity, their emotional proximity, that's when some incredible magic happens. So do that with yourself. Spend time inside of yourself. Make that human connection to you. See what you find, see what you feel, because I promise there's a wealth of knowledge, information and trust and intuition that's right there with you. You're carrying around with you all the time. You've got it Best to you in parenting. Trust yourself. You've got it Best to you in parenting. Trust yourself.
Speaker 1:You've got this Talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to the Ordinary Doula podcast with Angie Rozier, hosted by Birth Learning. Episode credits will be in the show notes. No-transcript.