Do we really need a night doula?
How do you know if you really need someone to come support you at night? Especially when you have to book people well in advance in order to have available help??
This is the hardest with your first newborn or multiples. You’ve never done this before, and you don’t really know how it is going to be. With a second or third baby though, you know what birth and baby life looks like for you and how you recover—and your confidence level with your a baby is different. You also know how you manage with broken sleep, as newborns interrupt your sleep for feedings for several months—and most intensely in the first 8 weeks.
If you have welcomed a newborn home before, you know how easily you wake up, how long it takes you to go back to sleep, and how well you function with sleep that has been caught in small chunks. Some parents are AMAZING at this, and bounce back through the newborn time frame with minimal loss of function. They can keep their newborn fed and thriving, care for and feed themselves, and also run a house full of kiddos or get in some part time work hours. But most people can’t.
Most of us fall apart a little bit when our sleep is broken up. Some of us become completely dysfunctional and then our mental health starts to fail when we push beyond the acceptable threshold of stress. Some people vacillate back and forth between levels of function and utter breakdown, and somehow seem keep all the plates spinning but are right on the edge.
If you haven’t had an infant, have you:
Been severely jet lagged?
Pulled all nighters for work or school?
Worked night shift and needed to do all your sleeping during the day?
Cared for a sick person sitting at their bedside?
Potty trained a new puppy at night?
If you have experienced this kind of sleep disruption, you probably have a good sense of how you bounce back, how long it might take for you personally, and the quality of your relationships during the disruptions. If you know you lose more than you can afford to in your life or work, overnight care for you and your baby might be really helpful for you.
Having a stretch of sleep that is consolidated can be very restorative, and can help you de-fragment your brain in order to resume function when you need it. A night doula can help both the non-birth parent get a full night sleep, and a breastfeeding parent get MORE sleep (just not the whole night usually as it effects milk supply).
When do you NOT need an overnight doula?
When you have a baby that wakes only to feed, going right back to sleep, and sleeps well in their bassinet or crib
When you are great at napping and can be flexible with catching up on sleep
With a partner who offers to take half or more of the night feeding and caring for baby (and you have a plan to keep your milk supply up if you are breastfeeding)
If you have learned how to safely room or bed share, meeting both parent’s needs to sleep as well as baby’s
If you have extended family who support you with breaks in the morning or evening so you can rest, or even if they will take a shift of caring for baby at night between feedings.
If you already have insomnia and seem to function with some compensations that you have managed for years already
I have seen many families over the years learn how to manage this without help at night, both from setting up a plan in my prenatal classes, and some who got doula support during the day for naps and learning some sleep deprivation management approaches. We know overnight care is expensive, and we are here to help you manage ways to not need it! We want you to thrive, and to have harmonious family relationships as well as beautiful memories with your babies.
If that means you want to book one of our amazing overnight doulas, then we are happy to offer you what we have (but they book up fast!). If you don’t have this in your budget, or really just want to do this by yourself, take a class or hire a daytime doula for some planning and support along the way.
Not everyone needs an overnight doula, even if your friends or family did and they highly recommend it. For those that do, do they feel weird about it? Maybe at first, but once they meet their doula their fears and awkward feelings fly out the door and they are happy to welcome in competent and trustworthy care so they can catch up on sleep. (It seems weirder before you have an infant, I promise.)
Did you know you can also set up a doula fund and have friends and family buy gift certificates for doula care (day or night)? Check out the page here: https://www.abcdoula.com/shop/gift-certificate