Dr Vijaya Krishnan explains what a Lamaze childbirth class is and how it can benefit you in your journey of childbirth
Lamaze certified class. What does that mean? There are many, many hospitals and many, many places which advertise that they are running Lamaze classes. But as a consumer, I think it’s very important to know who you are choosing to provide what kind of information to you. Then there are many philosophies of childbirth and Lamaze is one such philosophy.
It’s a way of looking at birth has from the lens of six healthy birth practices and everything that is taught in the class is about ensuring that the woman has excellent evidence-based knowledge about the kinds of choices that she’s making, whether it’s a pregnancy, whether it’s a labor and birth, whether it’s postpartum or even newborn care, parenting, and breastfeeding.
The difference essentially between a say, for example, a hospital run class, versus, an independent Lamaze class is that many times the hospital and classes are of two kinds. One where you have a free class where there is lots of information given to you from somebody taking a small section on nutrition to another person taking a section on anatomy or third person take, giving you a few, maybe an hour of exercises on breathing techniques, to the anesthetists talking about epidurals.
That’s one kind of class. Now, it’s not that it doesn’t serve any purpose, but many times the people attending the class almost have, a lack of in-depth information about what kind of choices they should make. And oftentimes it is a restriction about the kinds of topics that a childhood educator can teach in such classes.
An independent certified Lamaze class is two things. One is -that the person who is teaching the class is, has attained the certification, from an international organization called Lamaze, they have, they have not only taken the coursework that is required, but they’re also certified and pass.
They’re passed the examined, thereby got certified. This is an international certification and the strict standards enable that the classes are taught with certain data sets. There is a certain essential content that the Lamaze educator has to disperse, and those that enable the parent to over a period of many sessions, not only again, receive information, but also reflect, introspect, ask questions, come back and see what are the, go back and talk to their care provider about what are the potential things that are important to them.
See if that care provider is able to accommodate some or all of the things that are that they want, and if not, make different choices. Also learn about breastfeeding newborn care parenting, but don’t do all of this in an atmosphere of non-biased evidence-based information allows for the parent to make good choices for themselves through pregnancy, birth, and new parenting.
