Postpartum Doulas – What Do They Do?

When most growing families hear postpartum doula, they often think of postpartum depression.

Here are our “Top 3” fast facts about postpartum doula care and the benefits to your growing family.

1. Your postpartum doula is your personal guide to navigating life with your new baby.

It doesn’t matter if it’s your first baby or your fifth; each baby has its own unique set of quirks, likes, and dislikes. For every parent and every baby, there is a mutual learning process that will happen. In those early days, you are learning your baby’s cues. Exploring what their preferences are.

As postpartum doulas, we have the training and experience to help you understand your baby’s cues. We are the experts in options. So if one thing doesn’t work for your baby, we can quickly move on to the next option. This minimizes a lot of stress and frustration for our clients.

2. Your postpartum doula is the Fairy Godmother of Sleep for you and your baby.

Let’s face it, no matter how your baby is born, sleep deprivation in those days and early weeks is real. Broken sleep, lack of quality deep, and REM sleep can leave even the most patient and attentive parent exhausted, less focused, and short-tempered. Those early days are hard. On everyone.

As postpartum doulas, we help growing families get the sleep they need to feel rested, focused, and on the top of their game. They just need someone to be there to help them get through tonight. Someone to throw them a lifeline.

That’s where we shine. We offer daytime and overnight care to help your family transition to life with a new baby with as much rest and confidence as possible.

3. Your postpartum doula is like the best life coach ever. A life coach who is super skilled in supporting growing families. She provides emotional and physical support, free of bias or judgment.

Bringing a baby home is hard. Adjusting your life to accommodate that new baby is even harder. Rewarding and worth it, but it’s hard stuff. Your relationships with others also change. The dynamic between you and your partner will change. The dynamic between you and your friends and family members will also change. It’s very easy to feel isolated, alone, and misunderstood, even in a room of people who have known you for years.

The person who was once confident and made quick and decisive decisions can often feel uncertain or concerned about making the right choices surrounding baby care and self-care after birth. Your postpartum doula is there to help you navigate these twists and turns from an unbiased, non-judgmental point of view. She brings her experience, knowledge, and vast resources to the table. She helps you feel confident, heard, understood, and most of all, supported and validated.

One of our clients said it best:

“The end of my pregnancy was hard. After birth, complications had me in and out of the hospital during the first two weeks. While we knuckled through, those two weeks are a blur. Then we had a major life event in our family that led us to our breaking point. It was then that a friend told me about postpartum doulas and suggested I give Tucson Doulas a call.

When our doula arrived, she suggested that my husband and I head to bed to try and catch a nap. We didn’t sleep for those two hours, but we did talk about all that had happened over the past three weeks. We realized that we didn’t feel like we were really able to focus yet on our new baby and becoming parents.

When our little girl was ready for her next feed the doula asked if I had any questions about breastfeeding and how feeding was going in general. We talked about my early health struggles after the birth. She asked about my baby’s weight gain, and she checked our latch and gave a few tips to help me feel more comfortable during a feeding.

Over the next week, our doula came for 4 hours a day each day. We talked about my birth and she helped me understand some of the things that had happened and their impact on my abilities as a mother in the days that followed. I realized that I wasn’t failing at being a good mom, I had overcome some pretty serious obstacles.

Our doula reassured me that I was doing a good job. She helped me communicate my needs with my partner.

Helping me learn how to get out of the house with my baby all by myself was amazing. She helped me make a plan and then I followed the plan with her there for support.

Our postpartum doula was the best “life with baby” coach ever!!

We recommend a postpartum doula to all of our pregnant friends!”

Families often plan for the birth of their baby. But we also love helping growing families plan for the weeks after their baby is born.

We are passionate about helping parents become confident, empowered, and excited about life with their new baby.

Ready to learn more about postpartum doulas and how they can support you?

Take a listen below to our podcast, The Doula Download and listen to Postpartum Doulas – What do they do?

Love what you’re hearing; check out our other episodes on Apple Podcasts or Spotify!