Cherise McManus is a nurse and doula in the North Carolina and working to become a lactation consultant. She shares her experience becoming a Certified HUG Teacher.
I choose to add HUG Your Baby to my toolkit as a nurse and doula because I wanted to provide this information to birthing individuals before and after birth. As a nurse and doula I work closely with parents during those intense moments but don't really feel like I have enough time to teach them these basic and important concepts about their babies. Surprisingly, a lot of parents don't know about their baby's body language, what the behavior means and how learning about this body language will help them in the long run. Teaching my first course definitely taught me that parents, new or repeated", will benefit from the HUG information and resources.
I finally taught my first HUG Your Baby course today. It was a small course with three couples but the smaller the better. I know the smaller class allowed me to really focus on answering all of their questions without feeling like I had to rush. I did a short poll with 5 questions and allowed for them to answer the questions. I then went through each section in the HUG PowerPoint and encouraged each couple to ask questions after watching each section of the video.
Overall, each couple learned something new. All of them were happy to learn about baby’s “Resting, Ready and Rebooting Zones” as that was something that all three couples did not know. I was also really happy to provide this information to couples of color since this is was my main target population. I ended the class with the same quiz used in the beginning of class and with a discussion on how each couple was going to incorporate the HUG concepts in their lives as parents.