Lisette, one of our local NCT practitioners, tells us how she brought her vision of an open-to-all postnatal drop-in to life
Introducing...
our postnatal drop-in
The idea for this drop-in started from the experiences of several NCT practitioners in other parts of the UK, who run similar schemes.
In this area, we are very fortunate in having a variety of NCT postnatal courses such as Early Days, Baby Massage and Introducing Solid Foods. These run regularly in Beckenham, as well as Bromley, Crystal Palace and Hither Green, to name but a few local areas. But the idea was to bring something to Penge, which hasn’t had anything apart from Essentials antenatal courses for many years.
We had the great opportunity of working in conjunction with Baby Cafe Penge, which has a room large enough to accommodate the postnatal drop-in easily, and the two services we felt would run happily side by side and complement each other.
Some of you have done Early Days and may be wondering: how is the drop-in different?
The main difference is that in Early Days there is a closed group who meet together for several sessions, get to know each other pretty well and become good friends; they have the ability to set their own agenda and ask the facilitator to bring information regarding a large number of postnatal topics. The environment in Early Days is cosier and it is easier to take things more deeply.
This is not possible in a drop-in, where the participants may be different each time, and where the topics, of necessity, have to be planned in advance and are more limited in number. I have essentially chosen topics which are likely to be useful to a large number of parents:
sleep; crying; the transition to parenthood; relationships; baby development; returning to work and safety in the home. These will repeat in a six-week cycle. The environment is more open as we are in a large shared room. One other important difference is that Early Days are women only and we’ve had quite a lot of fathers coming to the drop-in!