3 Postpartum Prep Mistakes New Parents Should Avoid

Welcome back to the Postpartum Prep Podcast. My name is Ceridwen, I'm your podcast host. And today we're going to be talking about the common mistakes I see first time expecting parents make when they're preparing for life after birth.

And this episode is actually an accompaniment to my new free guide about the top three postpartum prep pitfalls. These are the struggles that I see families experiencing time and time again after giving birth. Struggles that could easily be prevented with the right preparation.

And if you want to download that guide, you'll find it in the show notes. Let's just get straight into our postpartum prep pitfall number one, which is not prioritizing skin to skin after birth. Skin to skin, if you don't know what I mean by that, it's when you have your baby just in a diaper and you are, usually it's on your bare chest, so you're shirtless, and you have baby just on you, literally their skin is touching your skin.

That's what skin to skin means. But it's especially in terms of that chest to chest, skin to skin. There's a lot of magical things that happen during that skin to skin.

It supports baby's temperature, heart rate, and breathing regulation. It supports reduced stress levels, breastfeeding success, and even the mother's mental health and bonding. Skin to skin is so important, and we're lucky that it is becoming more and more mainstream in practice.

After you give birth, everyone talks about that golden hour, and often hospitals are becoming much better now about supporting this golden hour for skin to skin after birth. But all the focus gets put on this golden hour, and what I wish more families knew is that skin to skin isn't just for this golden hour. It's actually most beneficial when it's ongoing, when it's continuous.

Dr. Nils Bergman is a leading researcher in this area, and he emphasizes that babies are biologically designed to be in almost constant skin to skin contact with their mothers in the early weeks. This just shows that skin to skin is not just for the golden hour. It's a practice that can continue all day, every day, as you rest and recover with your baby.

And in my own work, I work a lot with families who are struggling with breastfeeding, and I've noticed a common thread where families are not prioritizing skin to skin, maybe because they just don't know that it is something that is so important to continue, not just in that first golden hour, but all the time, as much as you can. And my own view is also that it's not just good for the baby or good for breastfeeding. I think it's also good for your postpartum recovery, because when you're just skin to skin resting with your baby, you're resting.

And that in itself is one of the most important things you can do to support your postpartum recovery in those early days. And here's the mistake I see parents making when it comes to preparing for postpartum. They don't know about the importance of skin to skin, and even if they do, they don't know that you need to prepare for it.

What does that mean? Well, if you're going to be resting in bed skin to skin all day with your baby, enjoying those newborn snuggles and just getting that time with your baby, you need to have everything else around you prepared so that you are actually able to stay in bed all day with your baby. Which brings me to the next postpartum prep pitfall, which is neglecting your self-care. You might be wondering, if I'm practicing skin to skin all day long with my baby, when will I have time to take care of myself? I've also heard this about that rule people say where you should sleep while your baby's asleep.

I had a pregnant mom once who had heard that phrase about sleep when the baby sleeps, and she asked me, well, if I'm supposed to be sleeping when my baby sleeps, when am I supposed to have any time to take care of myself? And the same comes for skin to skin. If I'm doing skin to skin all day with my baby, when am I supposed to have time to take care of myself? And this is part of the preparation that goes into ensuring you actually have the time and space to practice skin to skin. You need to ensure that you're going to be fully supported in meeting your own needs.

If you're going to make skin to skin a priority, you and everyone else around you need to make your well-being a priority too. Because if you're hungry or thirsty or you haven't showered in days, you're going to feel awful and you won't be able to just relax and enjoy those long stretches of skin to skin with your baby. But when your needs are met, you can really settle in and just enjoy all that time in skin to skin and soak up all the newborn cuddles you can get.

I mentioned my free guide and in my free guide I actually link to another free template that I have which actually allows you to just write out a little list of your self-care needs that you can print out, hang it up on the wall, and then you and everyone else around you can just have it in the back of their minds or maybe in the very, very front of their minds, which is why we're hanging it up on the wall so everyone can just see it there constantly all the time as a reminder that we need to make sure that these are our top priorities during the day. Making sure that you're fed nourishing foods, making sure that you're hydrated, making sure you are able to take care of your hygiene needs. Once we make caring for you a priority and we ensure that you are fully taken care of, that all your needs are being met, then everything else can become just enjoying all that time snuggling up with your baby.

And you'll actually be able to enjoy it once you're feeling fully taken care of yourself. Which brings me to my last postpartum prep pitfall, number three, which is not having enough support. I don't know about you, but when I was pregnant with my first baby, I really envisioned this cozy, quiet postpartum bubble for the first few weeks after birth where it was just me and my husband and my baby and I just imagined us lying in bed together all day just soaking in the cuddles, getting to bond together, settle into life and our new relationship as a family.

But the truth was that postpartum bubble, and we had told our friends and family we wanted those first few weeks just to be us and basically to be left alone for the first few weeks and then we'd see them with the baby when we were ready. And this sounded great in theory, but as a first time mom, I did not understand how intense those first few weeks really can be between learning to take care of a baby, learning how to breastfeed, my own postpartum recovery, doctor's appointments, and then all the other regular stuff on top of that, cooking, laundry, ten times as much laundry than normal, cleaning, running errands, pharmacy runs, grocery store runs. Because we had told everyone we didn't want any help in those first few weeks, we ended up completely isolated and we ended up feeling like we were doing it all alone.

We were running on such little sleep. All we wanted to do was just spend time with our baby and it ended up feeling like we were just juggling way too much. We were really lucky though because a lot of our close friends and family lived really close by and so we were easily able to reach out, ask them to come bring us a meal, ask them to come and just hang out so we could take a shower while they held our baby.

And what we really quickly figured out is that to support bonding with our baby and to support my postpartum recovery, we needed a village. Bonding and recovery require a village. Because support is what's going to be able to hold you through that time.

It's what's going to help you to be able to eat a nourishing meal without stressing about needing to go pick up your baby. It's going to be what helps you to take a shower or take a bathroom break. It's going to be what helps you to prioritize that rest and make those long stretches of skin to skin possible.

Now it doesn't mean having all your friends and family and neighbors and grandparents and your co-workers come and visit you all at once. It just means planning support strategically so that after birth you'll actually get the rest and the nourishment you and your new baby really need for that smoother start. So I have two extra templates for you that are included in the free guide.

So go get that free guide if you want these templates. The first one is a template to create a support list. So this is a list where if anybody says something like let me know if you need anything.

You know that generic vague like you kind of forget they've even offered to help. You don't really know what to say in the moment. Get this template.

You'll write down all the ways you can possibly think of for ways that people might be able to help you so that when they do offer support you can send them this list and they easily have a bunch of options of ways that they can choose from to support you. Alternatively you hang it up or you can do both. You hang it up in your home somewhere obvious when they first walk in so anybody who comes to visit you knows A. that they're there to help and B. they know exactly what options there are for them to help with.

The other template that I have to help you with organizing your support is a visitor boundaries template. So even though we might be inviting a very select few people into your space to support you through that postpartum period that doesn't mean this is a free-for-all. There are going to be very clear boundaries so you can protect that postpartum bliss bubble.

So you'll find that template in the free guide as well. So there you go. Those are the top three mistakes I see new parents making when they're preparing for postpartum and how to avoid them.

Mistake number one is not prioritizing skin-to-skin. Avoid it by making it a priority by understanding that skin-to-skin supports not only your baby but your well-being as a mom as well and knowing that it's not just enough to have the intention to do skin-to-skin you have to actually make the practical preparations that are going to allow that skin-to-skin to be possible which is what we do when we avoid postpartum prep pitfall number two which was neglecting your self-care. We avoid it by ensuring your self-care is a priority not just for you but for everyone around you including your support system which brings us to postpartum prep pitfall number three not having enough support and we're going to avoid that by ensuring we have that village but we have really clear expectations and really clear boundaries around what that support is going to look like and if you want to see it all laid out in the guide and you want those extra templates head on over to the show notes you'll find the guide down there before you leave though please make sure that you are subscribed that you hit follow to the podcast if you found this podcast episode helpful you can also leave a review thank you so much for listening if you have any questions at all just reach out to me in my Instagram DMs @motherbabywellbeing I'm always so happy to hear from you. I'm so happy always to put a name and a face to the listeners behind the screen and thank you for listening today be sure to grab your free guide be sure to follow and I'll see you next time