The Importance of Support in the Pre and Postpartum Period with Kristin Revere

Episode Timestamps:

•The locations and services provided by Gold Coast Doulas {01:00}

•Kristin’s motivation for writing the book “Supported” {04:35}

•Becoming A Mother course {08:00}

•The challenges of finding support and overcoming resistance to alternative therapies {10:35}

•Postnatal recovery and the importance of a support team {12:30}

•Importance of knowing your referrals very well {16:40}

•The need for affordable or pro bono services {20:40}

•Understanding that you can’t do everything on your own; taking a team approach {24:00}

Welcome to the MyBaby Craniosacral Podcast, where I share stories of the babies I’ve treated, tips for professionals and parents, and demystify this amazing healing modality.  I’m Meaghan Beames, your baby body work mentor.  I’m obsessed with all things babies, birth, healing, and plain old being a human.  Join me while I sink deep into craniosacral therapy.  Now let’s get into the episode.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the My Baby Craniosacral Podcast.  I am your host, Meghan Beames, and on today’s episode, we have Kristin Revere, and she is the owner of an all-things medical and pre- and postpartum period mom and baby services, really, in West Michigan.  I would love, Kristin, for you to share with our audience a bit about yourself and your business.

We are a full service doula agency.  My agency is Gold Coast Doulas.  So we support families with judgment-free support from conception through the first year, but if you look at our sleep consulting services, we really work with toddlers, so up to age five.  And we do offer everything from classes to lactation with our IBCLCs to birth doulas as well as day and overnight postpartum support.  Our core focus is helping families get sleep, so most of our postpartum doulas are working overnight with families.  We work with NICU babies, twins, triplets, and cover a large area, not only West Michigan for postpartum but also northern and southwest Michigan Lakeshore communities.

Do you have a home base, or is this all mobile services?

Our office is in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  We, of course, support our clients wherever they have their babies, so we work in hospitals, support home births, birth centers.  And then for the postpartum support, we are going to the clients’ homes and helping them in person.  Sleep consulting is a virtual service most of the time unless families bring us in to do some in-person work on getting their nursery to be more appropriate for sleep.

It sounds like you have a lot of people working for you.

Yes, we have 26 subcontractors.  They all own their own businesses and work through Gold Coast.  Some of them are registered nurses and work in the hospital.  I have a speech pathologist on the team.  Others work as nannies part time, and then some doulas take work primarily through Gold Coast.  Outside of the IBCLCs on our team, the nurses do not take a medical role.  They are acting as postpartum doulas and within that scope, so overall, our agency is nonmedical support for families.

I love that.  It’s almost like you have medical support without it being medicalized.  That’s beautiful.  For some people, it provides a sense of safety because sometimes being in the medical system feels unsafe for some people.

Right.  Certainly, there’s a lot of fear surrounding childbirth, especially after the pandemic, so families do like that continuous care, and there is so much evidence that doulas reduce interventions and increase satisfaction regardless of the outcome.  Certainly, our postpartum doulas can help process the birth, show feeding support.  All of us are trained to support basic lactation and refer out if our clients are having trouble to other therapists to be able to help make more of a successful transition, regardless of how they choose to feed their baby or choose to parent.

The point for this episode today is actually about the book that you wrote called Supported.  I would love for you to share with us why you made this book in the first place and just describe what it is.

Our book launches on Mother’s Day.  Supported: Your Guide to Birth and Baby.  I felt like there was nothing like it that really shows families and also birth and baby professionals all of the resources.  We’re very, again, judgment-free support focuses, so it’s not leaning one way.  I feel like a lot of books on the market are either focused on home births or parenting a specific way, and we have no approach.  So these are your options, and build your own dream team of professionals based on however you choose to birth your baby, parent your baby, and be able to have a support system, whether it’s communicating with family members, setting boundaries, or hiring professionals like yourselves.

Yeah, and I love having all of those options all together in one space so that people aren’t just getting lost in the Google rabbit hole and not knowing where to go.  I think one of the biggest things that parents say is that there are so many people giving me advice, and I don’t know which one to choose.  So I think of Amazon where you can have those comparatives at the bottom of the screen where it’s like oh, all of these things.  And your book is kind of like that, where you’ve got all those options.  You can choose – I like to call it choose your own adventure.  I love it.  So Supported comes out on Mother’s Day.  I’m very curious, because I would love to be able to write a book, as well.  But I also think that some of our listeners might have the question, how did you come about writing this?  What was your process like for that?

Yes.  Well, I should say I have a journalism degree.

Oh, that’s helpful.

So I can write.  But I’ve always imagined that I would have a book.  I just never thought it  would be about birth and baby.  I have a career in politics.  I’ve done advertising sales, nonprofit fundraising before having kids and falling in love with this work as a doula and agency owner.

That’s a bit of a 180.

Yeah, for sure.  But I feel like women’s health is the most pressing need, and supporting mothers in whatever they decide to do, whether it’s become a stay at home mom, go back to work, start their own business – there’s just not enough support in that process, whether it’s baby number one or baby number four.  And certainly childcare is a huge issue, and maternal mortality.  I don’t think, even though my kids are now 11 and 13 and 22, that I would be – you know, it’s not just a fad or just something I’m going through while my kids are young.

No, and now that we know too much, it’s hard to go back, right?  Now that we know so much.  Yeah.  So before we got on here, you were talking about how you created this course, and you knew that there was just a book in there.  And also, with your business, you have those courses, those online courses for parents, am I right?

We have some self-paced classes, like our Tired As A Mother sleep class.  There’s a breastfeeding class and newborn survival that are all recorded with live calls.  And then the Becoming A Mother course came out of the pandemic when we had to cancel all of our in-person classes, like Comfort Measures and HypnoBirthing, and pivot to virtual.  So we had this time and decided to be able to impact not only our current clients with a sense of community when they were pregnant and feeling very isolated but wanted to serve more women and mothers.  So the course has a workbook, and it’s all about prepping for birth and baby, and I cover all of the pregnancy and birth planning, and then Alyssa, who co-created the course and co-wrote the book, is a sleep consultant, so she covers all of the newborn aspects and postnatal prep that should be done and focusing on that important time after baby and planning and budgeting and figuring out your childcare options and so on.  We divided the course equally, and the book is also divided equally.

It’s amazing.  So you just took bits and pieces from the online course and created a book with it?

Yes.  And the course is called Becoming A Mother, and in the course, I have 30 expert videos, and one is a CST therapist.

Amazing!

Talking about what craniosacral is.  We wanted to have experts, so a car seat safety technician, a mental health therapist talking about signs of PMAD.  So we already had all of these experts assembled in the course, and then our students have lifetime access.  Some of them are on baby number two since the course launched, and they’re back in the course and they’re going through videos of things that are relevant to them in the moment.  Or they might want to hop on some live calls with us with questions.

That’s amazing.  The word that I was thinking was like, wow, they must feel so supported.

Yes!  And we couldn’t use Becoming because Michelle Obama has an amazing book called Becoming.

But that’s what your book is about; about feeling supported and making sure that you are supported in all of the ranges of this parenthood realm.  We are not taught how to make sure that we have that village.  We’re just told you should have a village.  But we have to make it.

Exactly . And I don’t feel like our friends prepare us enough.  Things are so different than when our parents had us.  Everything from safe sleep to feeding; it’s all changed, which is why I have a Grandparents class to help educate them.

I would love to have a grandparents class for craniosacral to be like, you might be extremely judgmental of your kids right now, taking their baby to a craniosacral appointment, but let me tell you something: you need to hold your judgment because this is going to help everyone involved.

Your industry is similar to, say, seeing a pediatric chiropractor and resistance there, or anything that might not be considered mainstream.  Even pelvic floor physical therapy has some resistance from family members or friends.

I’m a massage therapist as well, and our parents or even our grandparents, they were just told to ignore things that were happening in their body.  It will just go away.  Don’t worry about it.  But our generation is like, no, I can’t just ignore it.  I realize that this is keeping me from doing things, and I would like to actually enjoy life, rather than repress and suppress everything.  So I’m happy with the shift!

And not be in pain feeding your baby.  All of the things!  Dealing with colic.

Yeah, I’m going to listen to my baby.  If they’re scream crying, I’m going to listen to them, and I’m going to try to help them.  I’m not going to just tell them that they’re being manipulative.

Right.  Exactly.

Well, I love that you have this book coming out.  I think it will be really helpful.  And you were mentioning that it’s for people who are planning that pre- and postpartum period, but you also said before we got in here that it’s also great for health professionals.  So there’s one section of the book that talks about having a list of health professionals for that postpartum – actually, probably for the prenatal, as well.  But having a list of professionals and what their importance is – can you talk a bit more about that section of the book?

Yes.  That postnatal planning is often not as focused as taking childbirth classes, prepping for a baby shower, and even prepping for the birth.  So we get into all of the experts, not only in preparing for birth and supporting during pregnancy, but also in that postnatal recovery time and caring for newborn to toddler and all of the experts that can be brought in outside of your regular pediatrician, OB-GYN, or midwife, depending on who you’re working with.  And so we get into lactation, craniosacral therapists, pelvic floor physical therapy, and just the importance of budgeting for these experts and figuring out what your benefits are and what might work with health savings, flex spending, and then really getting the potential, no matter if it’s an easy birth and baby sleeps well, to have this team supporting you.  Oftentimes, to many of these appointments, you’re able to bring baby with you, so you don’t have to navigate childcare.  And obviously, with CST, the baby is getting treatment, but I know there are some massage therapists in my area that you can bring your baby to your massage appointment after giving birth.

That’s amazing.  Yeah, we do that too.  We do a parent and baby package.  So you bring your baby.  We’ll give them a CST treatment, and usually, they just fall asleep right after their treatment, so they sleep for an hour beside you or on a sleep mat on the floor, something like that.  And then you get your massage or your CST treatment.  It’s beautiful.  I love doing those ones.

It definitely is all about knowing options.  I do feel like certainly doulas – this would be a helpful resource for doulas, but other professionals with the resource section and different helpful apps would find that it would be beneficial.  Some people don’t even know much – they may know what a birth doula is, but they may not know how a referral to a day or overnight postpartum doula can make a difference in the mental health and even in a couple’s relationship and their stability.  If they’re not getting sleep, they’re going to fight more.

Absolutely.  So it breaks down the importance of each of these health professionals?

Yeah.  Exactly.

That’s wonderful.

And when and how they should be used, when to reach out, how to pay for them, all of it.

Amazing.  I wish that there was more of an emphasis on planning on the postpartum period.  I hear a lot of parents being like, nobody told me.  I didn’t know that my baby was going to possibly have reflux.  I didn’t even know.  And they’re scrambling after the baby comes, but they felt so prepared for the birth.

Yes.  Again, there’s a lot that happens before that six week appointment after giving birth, and oftentimes, you’re isolated.  Your partner is going back to work.  You might have a little bit of family support, but then you’re left to figure it out on your own if you don’t have a postpartum doula.  So really having that knowledge and access to trusted resources in your community are key.  And then other health professionals knowing how we can all work together and refer our clients and patients, depending on the provider, to be able to better holistically care for mothers in this vulnerable time.  And for babies.

For me, when I’m training people in this, in CST, something that I emphasize is getting to know these people you’re going to be referring out to.  So not just understanding what they do and what their name is, but actually getting to know them on a personal level so that you know who you are referring out to, as well.

It’s huge.  Absolutely.

There have been times where there was a team that I was referring to, and then the feedback I got from parents was like, I didn’t really like my experience there.  And I was like, well, thank you very much.  I will not be referring to them anymore.

Sometimes it’s personality.  It’s not even that they weren’t an expert in their field.  They may have done everything right, but if they don’t connect emotionally during such an emotional time, it may be a good resource for a different patient or student.  But not necessarily for that individual.  And we try to go on personality as well as the experience that our clients are looking for.  Again, knowing your resources.  I know that everyone’s got different approaches, different specialties within their field.  So there are so many different reasons for knowing your referrals well.

Yes.  I mean, you wouldn’t send someone who you know has really high anxiety to somebody who doesn’t have a great bedside manner.

Exactly.

But you wouldn’t know that unless you got to know that health professional.  But if you had someone who was a straight shooter who needed all the information and was fine with it, you would absolutely send them there.

Yeah.  It’s like if you look at the DISC, for example, the personality assessment.  Not everyone is going to get along with a D or they may not want an I who will talk their ear off.  They may want someone who’s very sensitive and more of the S and the caretaker.  So we find that when I match doulas with families and really trying to find the ideal personality based not only on the mother but also the partner.

Yeah.  Because it’s not just a dyad, right, especially if there are two parents.  It is a triad or maybe even more because of other kids involved.  So keeping in mind that there are multiple personalities and dynamics. 

So you said you’ve got CST in there, physiotherapy.  What other health professions do you have that you like to have a list of?

So certainly different specialties within chiropractic care.  If you’re looking for a Webster certified chiro or a pediatric.  Dieticians, pediatric dentists are big parts of it.  All of the different mental health experts, whether it’s a relationship struggle or PMADs or posttraumatic stress after a traumatic birth.  Whatever our clients are going through.  And then for me, car seat safety is a big issue, and then just looking at even navigating where you can deliver your baby, who can deliver your baby.  Explaining all of the options, like what is maternal fetal if you are high risk, and OB, certified nurse midwife, who works in the hospital, or a certified professional midwife who attends births at home.  Really, all of the options that you would have for support.  And then looking at fitness classes and prenatal yoga and some of the classes you can take with baby after healing.  Things like, of course, pelvic floor physical therapy and getting physical therapy during pregnancy and those types of options.

All of these things are so incredibly important.  I understand that not everyone is going to be able to afford or have resources or money to pay for these things, but my desire with CST and training as many CST practitioners as possible is that when there are a multitude of them, there are also more who can give out either free services every once in a while or work on a pro bono or work on a sliding scale.  And I think that more and more people are joining this postpartum career in the postpartum field, and it’s wonderful.  It’s wonderful that we do have this list of health professionals.

Yes.  And then hopefully maternity benefits and paternity benefits keep expanding.  Some self-funded insurance plans cover doulas, and then there’s Carrot Fertility and Progyny.  Yes.  So things are starting to shift, and I know that there’s support for adoption in some benefits and fertility.  Hopefully, things can expand even more to include CST.

I hope so.  I really do, because the body work aspect is, I think, undervalued.  You know, people think that babies come out a clean slate, and that is – that couldn’t be further from the truth.  That’s partly why we do need this list of health professionals is because this baby has stored trauma in their body and it’s coming out as symptoms and distress, right?  And I wonder – not that I want to put other professions out, but I wonder how many parents would not have such a difficult time if they knew all of the resources that they had available to them.

Exactly.  That’s why I’m hoping the book is a starting point, and then people will have more access.  Not everyone can afford to join my Becoming course, but most everyone can buy a book or borrow.  This will be on Kindle.  There’s a hardcover, a paperback, and then in mid-June, it will be out on audiobook.  So if you have an Audible account, you can listen.

Amazing.  Well, I do, so I’ll probably listen.

Awesome.

That’s the thing, that it needs to be accessible.  This information should be accessible.

Exactly.  And just knowing national support groups and parenting groups and all of the options and resources and what I consider would be evidence-based information.  This is only my personal experience as a doula, as a business owner, and a mother.  So I’m not speaking in a clinical perspective.  But I feel like, again, after lots of work trying to refer books for my clients, there’s nothing like it.  The closest thing would be What To Expect When You’re Expecting, which was written by a mom, and isn’t really covering all of the things that we cover in this book.  Not so much about assembling the experts.

Right.  That is so incredibly important.  We were speaking earlier before we came on here, and I did my doula training when I was – oh, how old was I?  I was 30.  And they focused strongly on having that referral source, your list of referral sources, before you start taking clients, because these parents are going to be struggling and they are going to need the help, and you need to know who you’re sending your people to.  You need to have that ready for parents because you can’t do everything yourself.  And we’re not supposed to do everything ourselves.  It’s better to have this team approach.

Yes.  And birth doulas, we follow up and have a postnatal appointment with our clients within two weeks of when they deliver.  So again, a great time to give resources and support in that way.  And then postpartum doulas are supporting right when they get home, as long as they need.  For us, since we work through the first year, sometimes we don’t even begin work until parents are going back to work from their leave and want to get rest and support.  They may have had a lot of family support initially, or their partner may have some leave time.  So we’re not always there early, but there’s still a lot we can do as far as giving resources and referrals.

Yeah, that’s amazing.  Well, thank you so much for speaking with me today.  I know that your book is needed, is necessary, and whoever is listening, Mother’s Day, Supported comes out, so keep your eyes open.  I believe this episode will go live right around that time, so hopefully we can get more sales driven to you, some more clicks on your link.  We will share all of the information for you, Kristin, in the show notes so that people can find you.  Other than that, where do you think people would be able to look for your information?

So the book will be on Amazon, so you’ll be able to find it.  There’s a preorder for the ebook right now, but the actual print book will not be up and live until Mother’s Day.  The Gold Coast Doulas website, which is www.goldcoastdoulas.com, does have a page for the Supported book, and also the Becoming A Mother course if anyone is interested in that.  And I’m on social media, so Instagram, Facebook, @goldcoastdoulas.  And then of course, I have the Ask the Doulas podcast, where I’ll be having you on soon.

I know!  I’m so excited!  I can’t wait to share more about CST!

The podcast is all about interviewing experts like yourself in the birth and baby space.

Amazing.  Well, I feel grateful that I’m able to be seen as that expert.

Definitely!  Thank you so much, Meghan.  It was great to talk with you!