We've been taking the Bradley Classes for 3 weeks now, and also took a Newborn Care Class this Saturday.
The Bradley Childbirthing method is similar to Lamaze (both were developed in the 1960s), however the main difference is that it focuses more on the role of the husband as a partner in the delivery, and it focuses on the mother's natural ability to give birth without much medical intervention (in the case of a normal, low-risk pregnancy, of course). We learn about relaxation techniques and exercises that you can do to help strenghten certain muscles and prepare the body for labor. A lot of the exercises are similar to the prenatal yoga stretches that I'm doing a few times per week as part of a pregnancy yoga video.
It also teaches about the midwife philosophy of childbirth versus the medical community philosophy so that you can make informed decisions. It doesn't teach that the medical model is wrong, just that sometimes it's good to first try the midwife approach. For example, if the baby is a few days overdue, the midwife approach would be for the mother to try help labor get started by taking long walks, stimulating the nipples, eating spicy food, and other techniques to get labor started naturally, whereas the medical model would be to use drugs like pitocin to induce labor. You can try the midwife model first, and if that fails and the doctor feels that it's dangerous for the baby to stay in any longer, then it's time to try the medical approach.
The birthing center I'll be using is close to a hospital, and the midwives there are also trained to deal with certain complications themselves. They also have medication available if the mother feels she needs it. It sounds like a good compromise between a hospital birth and a birth at home.
The other class we took is a Newborn Care Class. There we learned about the usual things like changing diapers, bathing a baby, feeding a baby. It also talked about the emotional care of a baby. The current prevaling philosophy is that you cannot spoil a baby in the first year. If they cry it's ok to always come to them and pick them up, rather than teaching them to stop crying on their own. They also said you don't want to force a baby to a feeding schedule, but let them feed whenever they want to.
Another interesting thing in the class was a video by a Dr. Karp. His theory is that gestation for humans is actually 12 months, not 9, and that the last 3 months take place outside the womb.
When a baby seems to be crying for no reason (as with collicy babies),
he suggests imitating the environment of the womb for them to calm
them. In the video, he showed how to swaddle the baby so that its arms can't flail around, and he then laid the baby on its side and introduced a white noise
(like saying shhhh, or turning on a vacuum cleaner or hair dryer). It
was pretty cool to see how it calmed the babies immediately.
All in all, it's been an educational few weeks.
Posted by pjakobs at December 16, 2003 12:14 PM