The journey to becoming a postpartum professional
This reflection is by Julia Jones, as part of the series: How the Newborn Mothers team became postpartum professionals.
Read more here: Expanding beyond birth work into postpartum care by Dusk Liney and From patchwork career to postpartum care professional by Antonia Anderson
Postpartum care was once a common profession worldwide and in some cultures, it still is!
But where I live, postpartum care is not widely known or understood.
It can be common to feel called to this profession but be questioned by society or have doubts about whether this is the right career path for you. If you’ve internalised patriarchal beliefs about the value of women and caring work, it can be especially difficult to take the leap.
In this blog post, I’ll share my journey to becoming a postpartum professional and give you some things to consider while taking your own tentative steps.
How I became a postpartum professional
I began my journey as a postpartum doula before I was a mother and when I was only 24 years old. I became interested in postpartum care while travelling through India. I saw how differently new families were treated, cared for, and respected in other cultures, and I thought we were doing something wrong in my culture. I started studying Indian postpartum care in 2008 and eventually realised that postpartum care was once alive in all cultures, including mine. We just needed to remember!
Over the next few years, I studied five different postpartum doula trainings. I learned about baby care and breastfeeding but still had unanswered questions.
When I had children, the search became more urgent.
I needed to know how my brain, hormones and identity had changed. I sought acknowledgment and support for the deeper emotional and spiritual aspects of becoming a mother. I was looking for rites of passage and a celebration of my new role.
I wanted this for myself on a personal level and wanted to know how to respond professionally and culturally.
So, I started exploring postpartum from different angles. I studied social justice and communications at University and worked in Community Development. I also started exploring other areas that were new to me, including anthropology, traditional medicine, cultural care and brain science. I was looking for threads to follow, trying to figure this out.
I began implementing what I was learning in my work with new mothers and soon had a full client load. And other doulas started asking me where I learned about postpartum care.
In 2012, I started training other doulas at my mum's house. I think we had seven people face-to-face sitting around my mum's kitchen table at that first training, and now we've trained nearly 2000 students in 60 different countries around the world.
I've also published two books, one of which is a bestseller. Seeing my book about postpartum care at number three on the Australian Amazon bestseller list in 2019 was a spine-tingling moment; I realised that postpartum care could be mainstream.
When I started, I felt so alone in my vision of reminding my culture about postpartum care.
Now, we are having a global conversation about the journey to becoming a mother and how to care for new families.
And that's what I'm here most of all for - systems change. I want to change culture. I want to change policy. I want postpartum care to be available to every family.
Why is postpartum care important?
After learning about Indian postpartum care, I noticed they also offered similar care in Chinese culture. I started looking into my cultural background and found examples of postpartum care in Europe. I finally realised that postpartum care was the norm throughout human history in all cultures until recently.
I realised that there are places where postpartum care is still practised and people who are alive who are postpartum knowledge keepers. I noticed that much of postpartum care was universal and based on the unique biological experience in the brains and bodies of birthing parents.
But it also became apparent that mothers impacted by colonisation and the patriarchy have similar postpartum experiences worldwide.
Right now, at least one in five women experience anxiety, depression, or both during the transition to motherhood in Australia. The rates are similar in similar countries like the US, Canada, the UK, and New Zealand. Research has found that fathers are likely to experience anxiety and depression at the same rates, but they aren’t being screened or diagnosed.
Two-thirds of mothers in Australia don't meet their own breastfeeding goals. These aren't goals set by the World Health Organization or governments. These are kind and caring mothers who want to breastfeed but don't have access to information and support.
The leading cause of maternal death in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the US, and the UK is suicide.
Cultures like mine are not providing the practical support, evidence-based information, rites of passage and cultural care needed on the journey through early parenting. There is a good reason that postpartum care was once universal!
The history and future of postpartum care in my culture
I learned that my grandmother's generation usually spent two weeks in hospital after giving birth, not for medical reasons, but so they could rest and heal. I learned that their bellies were bound with old bed sheets and they were brought special food and drinks.
Now, mums are sent home from the hospital between four hours and four days after giving birth, and there's very little support available to them at home. New parents might be visited by a midwife and a child health nurse and check in with their doctor after six weeks, but we are missing the crucial non-medical elements of postpartum care that were once the norm. We are missing the continuity of care required for a trusting relationship to be established between the care provider and the family.
Many people in my culture have noticed the lack of postpartum care and the impact this is having. The word ‘doula’ was coined in its modern sense by anthropologist Dana Raphael, one of my greatest inspirations. She coined the term in the seventies to mean a breastfeeding support person.
During the next few decades, women needed more support to access accurate information about birth and advocate for a safe and healthy physiological birth. Doulas stepped into the birthing room, too and now, we have doulas for all life transitions, including pregnancy, birth, and postpartum. Doula is even used to describe the role that provides support through death, loss, and abortion.
The problem is that the original Greek meaning of the word doula is female slave. Greek people don't like our current modern misuse of the word, and it's not used in this way in Greece.
So, I want to introduce a more specific and accurate term: Postpartum Education and Care Professional.
This non-medical role provides emotional and practical support during the life-changing transformation to motherhood. We provide information based on scientific evidence and connect parents with classes, groups, resources, hotlines, and other professionals. In a culture that lacks postpartum knowledge, we also need to educate people on the needs of postpartum families and how we can support them.
Ultimately, I’d like to see postpartum care publicly funded so every family can access the support they need and deserve. Until then, the majority of professional postpartum care worldwide is provided privately.
There are essential steps we can take today on the long path towards public funding; including defining the role and demonstrating its effectiveness. We can’t advocate for something when most people don’t know what it is or how it can make a difference.
As an industry, we work with respect and integrity, are clear about the scope of our work and stay within it. We collaborate with other care providers as part of a healthcare team and build relationships with key stakeholders.
And my contribution is to provide comprehensive education to support this role.
What knowledge do you need to provide the best postpartum care?
Postpartum is a time when many risks increase. Some risks are well known, like depression and anxiety, but others go largely unrecognised, like the increase in family violence and eating disorders after childbirth. Some marginalised families have more barriers to adequate care and require extra support and understanding.
Today, information is often siloed. For example, I notice parents get sleep advice from their yoga teacher, mental health advice from the pediatrician, and their mother-in-law tells them something about breastfeeding. Without one person who understands the full context and the family's vision, goals and needs, advice in one area might conflict with the family's goals in another. Sleep advice might undermine breastfeeding goals. Mental health support might disregard cultural context.
Postpartum Education and Care Professionals can meet a family during pregnancy and visit them perhaps once or twice a week after the baby's birth. Families feel safer to ask more vulnerable questions, disclose challenges and be more honest about their needs. Postpartum Education and Care Professionals can provide emotional support, referrals to other specialists, support and information that can help new families make the right decisions for themselves.
Postpartum Education and Care Professionals are well-placed to provide comprehensive support and referrals and need knowledge in many areas. Some of the knowledge required to provide high-quality care includes;
Foundations of mental health, sleep and breastfeeding and how they impact one another
Understanding of referral pathways and support available when things are out of scope
Cultural postpartum care and cultural appropriation
Evidence-based resources to support decision-making
Recognising and responding to family violence, and child protection and reporting
Supporting LGBT and neurodivergent families
Trauma-aware care including supporting survivors of sexual abuse and supporting families after loss, stillbirth or infertility
Supporting families through surrogacy, adoption, donor conception and foster care
You don’t need to know everything, but you need to know what’s normal, how to recognise red flags when to refer and where to find high-quality resources. We provide our students with a comprehensive resources list and encourage them to build their own, so they are prepared for the broad range of postpartum experiences.
Who can work in postpartum care?
Postpartum care is a skill you can learn, and there are no prerequisites. Good postpartum care is about being a good listener, linking people up with good resources and professionals, connecting them with their community and supporting people with boundaries and asking for help. These are all skills that you can learn.
People from various backgrounds become Postpartum Education and Care Professionals.
You might be from anywhere in the world.
You might be older or younger.
You might be a parent or you might not be a parent.
You might have years of experience in postpartum care or be brand new to this work.
You might have medical skills or experience or you might not.
Everyone is welcome.
Here are some examples:
Rachael
Rachael's background was in the culinary arts, but she felt called to a more caring profession. When her baby was born, Rachel’s experience of physical and mental health challenges began her shift towards postpartum care.
“It was really born out of my own pain and my own suffering…I couldn't find anything the way that I wanted to address women… I wanted no woman to have to go through what I went through.”
She lived in a rural area where the community was quite conservative, so she was unsure if being a postpartum professional would work for her and if she would be able to get clients. During her first year of business, Rachael started getting clients right away using some of the business models I teach in the Bonus Business module of our course.
“Leaving where we lived, it was really humbling because it felt like I could see so clearly the tendrils that my work had sent out into not only that community but the world. Places I've never been and people I've never spoken to, my work had impacted farther than I felt my reach was.”
Now, Rachael has published a recipe book, provides in-home care and offers retreats.
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Katie
Katie was a Social Worker in a hospital for 13 years and hadn’t planned to leave. After her second child was born, she travelled for a year with her family and became quite interested in personal development. Katie made the conscious decision to live in alignment with her values.
Katie took the leap to change careers when she moved to a new town for her partner's work and needed to find new work for herself, too.
“Made me realise that perhaps I didn't have to be a hospital social worker for the rest of my life, that there were other things…I remember having this conversation with Julia just before I was meant to take this job. I talked to my partner about it and I'm like, okay, I'm going to jump.”
Katie began her business in a small regional town with only 1800 residents. Not only was Katie starting her life from scratch, she was starting her business from the ground up too.
Eventually, Katie had so many clients she couldn’t say yes to them all. Katie now provides perinatal counselling, motherhood and parenting support through one-on-one sessions, workshops, local mothers' groups, and retreats.
Naomi
Naomi was a journalist for ten years, including working as the wellness editor at a well-known women’s magazine. When she had a baby, she realised she knew nothing about postpartum.
“I felt ripped off and I felt ripped off on behalf of all the other women in this culture. I just was like, we're getting absolutely rorted… Reading a book… on postpartum doulas made me kind of have this aha moment of, maybe this is something that I could do! I just felt like it was this amazing kind of dovetailing of two things I love, which is food and cooking for people, and also being passionate about this idea of having a fourth trimester that is nourishing and nurturing.”
I interviewed Naomi on my podcast just four months after starting her business and she had clients almost immediately and steadily ever since. She started out offering a meal delivery service and in-home postpartum care, then shifted her focus.
Now she has a popular podcast, offers an online postpartum preparation and fourth-trimester cooking course, a cookie mix for lactation biscuits, offers postpartum planning sessions and is currently working on a cookbook.
Ways to provide postpartum education and care
Some people embark on this journey with a clear idea of where they are headed. Maybe you want to run retreats. Maybe you plan to teach online. Maybe you will advocate for policy change…
Or maybe you have no idea!
It’s OK if you don’t exactly know how you will provide postpartum education and care. You can offer a few different kinds of postpartum education and care simultaneously. And you can change your services as your circumstances change, to fit your career around your other responsibilities.
You can still take the first step in this career and figure out those details as you go.
Here are a few examples of how you could provide postpartum education and care.
One-on-one in-home support
One-on-one in-home support is where I started and what many people typically think of as postpartum care. I used to provide massage, cook meals and just generally chat with people about things like breastfeeding, village building, boundaries and whatever else came up for the client. This is a very popular option, and this is where most people start.
Educational classes
You can educate people through planning for postpartum classes or design something specifically for grandparents, husbands or workplaces. You can create specific classes for creating breastfeeding plans or supporting families to gather the support of their community.
Mothers circles
Mothers' circles are growing in popularity as they are a significant space for sharing one’s experience. Mother's circles can be very broad or specific. I have one student who runs mothers circles for motherless mothers because of her experience of mothering without her mother.
Online support
You can run online courses or membership sites, which can combine education and care. Some of my students run mothers' groups online where people can ask questions at any time of the day or night, make friends with like-minded people and be supported with practical information.
Meal delivery
We have quite a few students who've created menus available for delivery once a week. Some of our students cook for clients one-on-one in their homes, like a personal chef for postpartum.
Traveling doulas
You might be a travelling doula if you want to see the world and your kids are grown up or you don't have children. You can visit people who live in remote or regional locations where they can't access postpartum care, living nearby to care for a family for the early weeks.
Incorporate it into your existing work
If you are already a yoga teacher, you might want to have this postpartum care knowledge to give a little bit more breadth and depth to your mum and baby yoga classes. Or, if you already work as a midwife, you can do this course for professional development and begin offering postnatal planning classes.
Agency work
Some people work for agencies, and some of my students even start agencies. Agencies gather and match a group of postpartum professionals with the right clients. That way, you're pooling your resources by sharing the cost of things like bookkeeping, marketing and administration, making it easier to manage the running of the business.
Are you ready to take the next step on your journey?
If you want to become a postpartum professional, check out our online, worldwide Postpartum Education and Care Professional training. It is one of the most comprehensive courses for professionals on postpartum care in the world. The training provides world-leading and evidence-based postnatal education to professionals. It teaches people how to provide practical, emotional and informational support to new families.
Julia Jones leads the training from Newborn Mothers, it is the culmination of 15 years in the industry where she has trained over 1500+ students in 60+ countries. The training is developed in collaboration with three other educators each with decades of experience in their focus area of postpartum support.
