Onset of labour – Activities for Childbirth Education

Onset of labour: activity ideas for antenatal teachers, midwives, doulas and other birth workers.

It’s safe to say almost every expectant parent wonders about the start of labour:

• How will we know?
• When do we go to the hospital?
• When do we call the midwife?
• When do I call my partner?
• What does it feel like?

Over my years as an antenatal teacher, doula and facilitator, I observed many other practitioners, attended antenatal classes during my own pregnancies, and read lots of books and blogs. Along the way, I adapted and developed a number of activities to cover the onset of labour in group and 1:1 sessions.

When I started out as an antenatal teacher, I used an activity from Mary Nolan’s book Antenatal Education: A Dynamic Approach to explore the onset of labour.

In this activity, each group or couple gets a set of cards with ‘symptoms’ on them, such as ’41 weeks pregnant’, ‘strong regular contractions’, ‘lower back pain’, ‘waters break with a gush’ and ‘mild irregular contractions’. Each group shuffles their cards, holds them face down, and turns them over one at a time, lining them up. When they decide “we’re in labour!”, they stop turning cards.

While this works well in training sessions with fellow antenatal educators, I found that couples struggled with the concept and mostly sorted the cards into ‘labour’ and ‘not labour’ instead. (Maybe that was down to my explanation – who knows?) These days, my Ready to Pop?! signs and onset of labour activity is a fun, ready-made alternative.

For my own 1:1 and group sessions, I moved to a labour timeline approach, using both my labour timeline banner and a labour beadline. First, we brainstorm possible signs of labour and warning signs (in two groups, depending on group size) and discuss them together. Then I reveal the timeline bit by bit.

Focusing on the onset of labour, participants (in small groups, if I’m working with a group) are asked to think about:

1. Who do we contact? How can we be ready? What do we need to remember to take with us?
2. Comfort measures
3. What’s happening in the body? Where are we? Where are we going?

This gives expectant parents a great opportunity to think practically: Is there enough fuel in the car? Do we both know where the maternity notes are? Is the birth bag ready? Do we have a plan B for transport, just in case? It leads nicely into how ‘being ready’ and having a plan B can help labour start and progress – bringing it back to hormones. See my ideas for teaching about hormones during childbirth.