Is hypnobirthing worth the money?

Congratulations, you’re pregnant! As well as feeling really happy, you’re probably also a bit nervous about a lot of things: how the pregnancy will affect you and your partner, will you be a good parent, how will you manage financially? It’s not cheap having a baby. You probably think that you have to buy lots of things for the new baby as well as considering how much money you’ll have coming in whilst you’re on maternity leave. Like most people, you probably have a limited budget.

First off, new-born babies only really need their parents. They need somewhere to sleep and clothes to wear. They need feeding, they need lots of nappies for all those nappy changes, they need lots of sleep and they need lots of love and cuddles. As you will be the most important person in their life, babies need parents that are calm, confident and in control, even during stressful or difficult situations.

With all you’ve got ahead of you, why would you spend money on hypnobirthing? It’s not cheap and how is it really going to help you?

Here’s how and why:

1.     Research into the effectiveness of hypnobirthing has shown that parents who attended classes generally had shorter labour, less need for medical interventions and less need for pain relief.

2.     If hearing other people’s scary birth stories is making you feel anxious about your own labour, hypnobirthing will help you to feel calm, confident and in control of your baby’s birth. Your labour can be a positive one.

3.     Hypnobirthing will enable your partner to have an active role during labour and birth and the confidence to help you when you most need support.

4.     Being stressed during pregnancy can impact on your baby’s brain development and having a difficult birth can impact on your emotional well-being and on those early days of parenting.

5.     Enrolling on a hypnobirthing course will teach you how to have the best labour you can under whatever circumstances present. Instead of worrying about your labour, you can take action to change the way you think about labour and how your baby’s birth is going to be.

6.     Generally, babies born to parents who have been to hypnobirthing classes tend to be calmer and happier.

7.     The skills you learn on a hypnobirthing course can be put to good use on your journey as a parent so you can be a calm and confident mum or dad. You’ll learn how to use visualisations which will help your milk to come through if you’re breastfeeding and can use these visualisations to help keep you cool and relaxed as you learn to look after your baby.

8.     If you’ve completed a full hypnobirthing course, you don’t have to do the whole course again if you have more children: you can do a short refresher course if you just want to remind yourself of what you learned first time around. However, you’ll go away from my course with the course booklet and a set of MP3s that are yours to use as often as you wish.

9.     Hypnobirthing doesn’t guarantee you a perfect birth, but you are stacking the odds in your favour massively to be able to have the best birth that you can. Nobody has a perfect birth but what you’ll learn on my course will enable you to ask the questions you may not have thought of before and to make the right decisions for you, whether you have a home water birth or check into hospital for a C-section. You will be in control and can feel positive about the decisions you’ve made.

10.  If you want the very best for your baby, thinking about how you want your labour to be should be at the top of your list. The circumstances in which your baby is born will have an effect on them too. You can influence how your labour goes and, although birth can be unpredictable, there are so many ways that you can help your birth to go more smoothly.

Is hypnobirthing worth the cost of the course? That depends on the value you place on the experience of giving birth. Having a calm, confident, gentle birth means that not only will you and your partner have a better experience of birth but so will baby. You can help your baby’s journey out of the womb into the world to be a peaceful, nurturing experience.

If you feel that investing in yourself and your baby’s birth is worth it; if you think that your mental health and postnatal recovery are worth it; if you think that starting out as a new mum feeling positive about parenting is worth it; that’s got to be worth the cost of a hypnobirthing course.