A Postpartum doula is someone who helps the entire family adjust to the addition of a new member. They can bring comfort, clarity, and a sense of calm to what is often a busy and restless transition. This is such a needed and missing element to so many postpartum journeys. A pregnancy is such an exciting and simultaneously confusing time. Luckily, this time is typically very documented and followed by medical professionals, as well as excited family members and friends. Many questions will be answered during this process of caring for a woman during her 40+week pregnancy. But once life makes the big shift back home following the birth, that is when the real work and questions begin. Typically, following birth, a woman goes to a six-week check up. If she is lucky, her care provider may even see her at the three-week mark. However, there is much to adjust to and need assistance with both before and after this time.
Postpartum doulas come alongside the mother and her family during the first three months of the baby’s life to care for them by providing educational, emotional, and practical support. As mentioned in DONA’s Position Paper, The Postpartum Doula’s Role in Maternity Care, postpartum doulas differ from a baby nurse in that, “Doulas provide excellent infant care, but their primary focus is educating and supporting parents...” This care may begin in the hospital or after the family returns home. Ideally, the doula will have met with the family during the pregnancy to become familiar with them and help them set healthy expectations for their postpartum journey. The doula can assist with newborn care, successful breast and bottle feeding, light household tasks such as meal prep and home organization for baby, emotional support, and referrals to necessary professionals within the community. Doulas can also help families create boundaries with visitors during the postpartum period that are sometimes difficult to set. As indicated in DONA’s Code of Ethics: Postpartum Doula, The doula knows that the family she is providing care for comes first, and guards their well-being above all else. Assisting with sibling care is also something that doulas can help with, but it should not take up the majority of time that the doula spends in the home. Clear guidelines can be set up about sibling care ahead of time, and the doula can recommend local resources for extra childcare if needed.
Doulas cannot perform any medical tasks such as assessment or diagnosis of health issues in the mother or baby. If she suspects that these issues might be at play, she can encourage the mother to reach out to her health care provider and assist her with note-taking of symptoms or accompaniment to a doctor’s appointment or lactation consultant visit to provide support.
The doula does her absolute best to include the mother’s support partner in many aspects of the postpartum period. This can be established from the time of the intake interview, by giving the couple ideas to consider on expectations they have for household tasks and emotional support from one another. The doula can teach the partner how to accomplish basic newborn care tasks, assist mom with breastfeeding, bottle feeding, pump parts cleaning, general meal prep, and assurance of nutritional and emotional health for mom. This allows for healthy flow and function of the relationship between both parents both during the postpartum period and long afterward. This can also play a major role on lessening postpartum depression for both partners as they each will feel more supported, understood, and valued in their respective roles.
Before the baby is born, she gets to know as much as she can about the family, their past experiences (if any) with the postpartum period, the layout and running of the family home, and the things that are most important to them about their upcoming season of life. Furthermore, each day that the doula performs services in the client’s home, she makes sure that it is the mother’s wishes and needs that come before her own agenda. She is careful not to share her own opinion on parental decisions, or what she might have done in her own experiences with newborns or postpartum recovery. Postpartum doulas maintain all that happens during the time of her services within a high level of confidentiality. The only exception to this is sharing of information and asking questions from other doula colleagues, while keeping the clients names confidential.
A postpartum doula should set a family up for success after she is no longer a regular part of their life. She both supports the mother’s wishes and instincts and fosters confidence in motherhood. She makes sure the partner understands their role and feels they can be successful and effective in parenting while being the best partner they can be. The birth of a baby and the time during the postpartum period will long remain in the memory of the mother. A postpartum doula makes sure her time with the family contributes to these memories being positive, in an effort to achieve better maternal mental health than if the family was left to navigate this period alone. Research indicates that having the assistance of a postpartum doula provides emotional benefits such as improved overall postpartum mental health and more specifically, decreased anxiety. Evidence from research also shows that postpartum doulas have been proven to promote family bonding through support for partners and siblings. Seeing an increase in families utilizing a postpartum doula's support will pay off immensely in the long run for future generations of new parents when it comes to overall family health and happiness.
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