Family Chiropractic

FF 06: 'School Readiness' with Kate Highland

Learn school readiness for your kids with principal Kate Highland and Newcastle chiropractor, Dr. Dorte Bladt.

Assistant principal Kate Highland shares with us how we can help our kids feel comfortable and confident as they enter a new and exciting phase of their lives: Big school.

Intro: Flourishing Families with Dr. Dorte Bladt, the Switched-On Kids chiropractor and her passionate friends sharing the secret of inspiring wellness to help your families thrive.

Dorte Bladt: I'd like to welcome Kate Highland today. Kate Highland is the Assistant Principal at Charlestown East School. I'm really excited to have you on and share with us about school readiness.

Kate Highland: Okay, thank you, Dorte. Yes, my job here at Charlestown East - which is a government school, a public school in New South Wales - is I look after all of the children in kindergarten Year 1 and Year 2. A lot of what I do is bring them into the school. So all of those processes to do with orientation and easing their transition into school here. I give a lot of advice to a lot of parents about that and I run the Whitebridge Community of Schools Readiness Night. That happens around May every year where we invite parents to come along. They can ask questions and it's a big information-sharing session.

Some of the things I say there, at that session, are to do with having strong links with your preschool and taking advice from preschool teachers because they know your child and they know what they're up to, they know their readiness levels and they're the best person to give advice about readiness. We, of course, haven’t seen your child yet at that stage of the year. We look forward to getting to know them.

But your preschool teacher will give you advice about things like how they're holding a pencil, for instance, and the areas that they need correction. It's also a good place to start making playdates with friends so that your children start to socialise and kindergarten, believe it or not, a lot of it is about socialisation and getting along with friends rather than academics.

Dorte Bladt: That's the most important thing, isn’t it?

Kate Highland: Well, you would think so and that, obviously, is something that is vital and it is our main focus, but we also believe that for your child to be an independent, functioning human being later on in life, they need to be able to relate and communicate with each other and learn all of those things that are vitally important.

A lot of times, skipping to the end of school, when children leave and we ask what it was that they really enjoyed about school, they’ll talk about kindergarten. They'll talk about their friends. They don’t remember learning how to read. They don’t remember learning how to count. They remember their buddy, the person that helped them in the playground open their lunchbox. They remember creative arts performances. They remember being in a play.  They remember those sorts of things. So those human aspects are vital as well as the academics.

Dorte Bladt: Well, preschool, when you think of it from preschool to kindergarten, it's a great transition then of being, like you say, learning how to grab that pencil and how to make friends. So you're building on that.

Kate Highland: You're building on those things, yes. So we look for lots of things in the children coming in. We look for people who can share, children who don’t demand to be first, who know that they've got to wait their turn. Something that parents can do - I know it sounds a bit funny, but parents can get children to put their hand up. I know that sounds strange but in that sort of playing schools and playing at being at school when you're at home and it's safe and secure and it's environment that they're familiar with, but having that play-acting time of let’s play schools, they'll read a book together and reading a book together is so vital. I've known people who’ve read to their babies before they were born. They've read to them when they were an hour old in the hospital and I think they're lovely stories about people who just value communication with their children.

Dorte Bladt: I used to do that with my daughter. I used to when she was hours old, like you say. I used to read to her in Danish.  I had read someplace that that was a really good thing to do and I always like checked around, is anyone coming.

Kate Highland: I'm fairly safe.

Dorte Bladt: Yeah.

Kate Highland: I think children just like that connection. They want that eye contact. They want that connection and if that involves something else to look at, to focus on, a picture of the Three Little Pigs in a book or whatever, that's what they love to do. So your children maybe they can, after you've read the story, maybe they can read it back to you and reading it can be pointing to the pictures and talking about them. It doesn’t need to involve text at that really early stage. It can be they can read a picture and then they can talk about it and use their memory. So there are a whole lot of things that parents can do literacy-wise but it involves playing at being at school.

Dorte Bladt: So do you feel it's important for parents to prepare their children for school that way? As in, should we, as parents, look into doing this, doing that? This is what we're preparing for... or is it more of a sitting back and waiting for teachers to sort of guide the way?

Kate Highland: Before they come to school, the parent is the most important teacher, and actually most of their life. Of course, the parent is the most important teacher, but I think - especially if they're just about to start school or just about to return to school - to alleviate any anxiety is to talk about what might happen "if". That might involve perhaps walking through a school, playing on the equipment - seek permission first - but ask if you can.

“Do you mind in the holidays if my child comes and plays on the equipment” or peeks in the windows or just becomes a little bit familiar with the environment. They know where the toilets are, for instance. They might not exactly know their room but they know where the playground is and the boundaries of the playground. All of those things just alleviate anxiety because it's information.

It also imparts a sense of, well, this is where the parent wants the child to be and that they know that the experience will be positive. One thing I'd like to ask parents and probably grandparents and older people not to do is not to relate scary stories from the past.  “When I was at school, I got the cane,” or “when I was at school...” Those sorts of things that parents like to talk about those experiences but they're not always positive. So sometimes children walk in and they're scared. I'll ask, “But what are you scared of?”

“Do you have a cane?”

“Well, no,” and so this unnecessary anxiety that I think we can probably do without.

Dorte Bladt: Most definitely!

Kate Highland: I know that it's not 100% positive all of the time. Classrooms are very busy places. They're very noisy. It can be a little overwhelming, but we don’t need the fear factor in there as well.

Dorte Bladt: No. So is it a good idea to share the positive stories? How much fun, like you were just saying, “oh, when I went to kindergarten I had a fun time doing visual arts,” or whatever.

Kate Highland: Yes, definitely, and even emphasising friends that you've kept. I used to tell my children about that I still have friends that I made in kindergarten or in high school or whatever, friends that I've kept through the years because then they can see the whole spectrum of the point of socialisation, and I guess when we're on socialisation, for people to realise that if they can limit the amount of screen time that their children have, because what children do, I find, when they're watching a screen is they're disengaging. They're shutting down from...

Dortee Bladt: Social contact.

Kate Highland: Yes, from that contact with real life. They're not hearing the birds singing. They're not hearing their brother singing off-tune in the car sitting next to them. So I've always thought that car trips were about singing songs and chants and chatting and telling stories.

There's one thing we did - we drove to Queensland years and years ago. We were in the car for 13 hours on and off, and we made up this game where you know how you go across a bridge and it will have something like Dead Man’s Crossing or, I don’t know, Bill’s Hill or Bill’s Crossing or something, and we would make up a story - how did that place get its name? Then we would take it in turns and so everybody in the car had to tell a story that was bigger and brighter or scarier or funnier. It took us hours and it was so much fun because we just spent that time communicating and bonding and interacting. There was no, “put a DVD on,” and, “I don’t want to hear from you” sort of thing.

Dorte Bladt: That's right. It's hard because it takes a little bit of input from the parents. I think sometimes we hop in the car and we just want to, oh, shut down for a moment, but if we put in that little bit of extra input and that little bit of energy in to start a positive experience then time will go faster and everyone would have a good time.

Kate Highland: Yeah and everybody loves a story. Children love hearing stories about what their parents' life was like in the past, just try and make it a bit positive! But yes, so all of those sorts of things are really important. I do think, back to playing at schools, take them places like a park. If you're going to buy them something, buy them a skipping rope because there's a whole lot of skills that are important and skipping helps - it eventually helps reading with your hand-eye coordination or foot-eye coordination, and things like using paint and scissors and glue, crayons and that sort of thing.

Occasionally, I have parents who say, “oh, no, my child doesn’t use crayons because they might draw on the walls,” which I'm always surprised about because I think, well, you're there with them. Do these things with them. Don’t just provide them.

Dorte Bladt: And walk away.

Kate Highland: Put them on the table and walk away. Draw with them. Colour with them. Show them nice things.  Try not to teach them too much. Leave the academics to people at school. So a little bit of writing their name, for instance. Children often like to do that.

Dorte Bladt: Why would you think... you're the teacher, of course, but what is the matter with the parents, if the kids are really excited, to teach them stuff?

Kate Highland: There's ways and means to teach things. When my daughter was three, she learned to read the word ‘exit’ because we drove down the freeway and she said, “what's that,” pointing to the exit sign, and I said, “it says exit.” And so all of the way, up and down the freeway for the next three or four years I got, “exit, Mummy! Exit, Mummy.”

These environmental print things are great. If they're in the supermarket and they can recognise the peaches and know that the picture is a peach, and that's what the label says, that's great to encourage that sort of thing, but I wouldn’t sit your child down and try and teach them how to write or too much of how to form the letters of the alphabet. Preschool will do a lot of that anyway, so I wouldn’t try to do those formal things. I'd try and enjoy your child more than try and teach them a whole lot.

Dorte Bladt: So there's a division between school and that home academic setting. So home is safe, it's fun.  It's not a place we necessarily do anything other than homework when the set time comes.

Kate Highland: Yes and when that's homework, you'll find that these days teachers set for a practical homework. My homework sheet will say things like, “count the forks in the drawer,” or, “how many steps does it take to get to the letterbox?"  You know, these practical things that we put in there so that it's a little bit more interesting. It's not always sit down with a pencil on a piece of paper. So teachers are very used to thinking outside the square now, finding things that kids want to do.

Dorte Bladt: So more play-based type.

Kate Highland: It's far more play-based and physical-based. I'll say, “set a timer and how many times can you do star jumps? How many can you do in a minute?” That sort of thing.

Dorte Bladt: What a great way to exercise.

Kate Highland: Yes. Well, it's just a bit different and they're tired when they get home in the afternoon. You’ll find they’ll sleep a great deal. It's a big deal to come to school and teachers are exhausted. The kids are exhausted, too.

Dorte Bladt: Absolutely and when you're talking about the physical side of things, how about, like for example, food? You as a teacher, what provides the best brain capacity for learning food to take?

Kate Highland: Okay, food choice is really important. A lot of schools, including us, ask that parents provide what we call the ‘nude lunch’, which is a lunch that's in a box that doesn’t have wrappings and papers because we're all into recycling and producing less rubbish, that sort of thing. So things that are wholesome and nutritious. Certainly, a lot of places have what's called Fruit Break or Crunch Break where we get them to bring... so we eat three times a day. One is morning tea and that might be fruit or it might be a snack of some sort, but even half a sandwich can be fine.

Fruit Break or Crunch Break, which is fruit and vegetable or water,  so small manageable pieces. If they walk in with a big green apple, I know they're not going to get through it. In a few minutes, it will land up in the bin.  Whereas half a mandarin or beans or a carrot, they can get through it.

Dr. Dorte Bladt: Or the apple cut up, I suppose.

Kate Highland: Yes, as long as it's cut up. So Fruit Break works really well. Strawberries, whatever is in season. Then lunch needs to be, again, probably a sandwich, but people sometimes - I'm out there in the playground and I'll see people have provided sushi for their children, or they’ve been really fabulous at being very inventive of what their children will like.

We do like to minimise packet food, packaged, processed-type things not just because of the litter part but because filling yourself with the sugar and the salt and those sorts of things aren’t so good. Please make sure that your children have breakfast. I think breakfast everyone says it's the most important meal of the day. I can tell a difference between children who walk in who’ve had breakfast and those who haven’t.

Sometimes I’ll say, “why didn’t you have breakfast?"

And the child’s response is, “oh, we had to get to school on time,” which just tells me, well, you're not getting up early enough.

Dorte Bladt: Yes, that's fairly simple.

Kate Highland: I would think fairly simple. So try setting routines with your child so that they know where their shoes are at, where their uniform is, packing their own bag or their lunch, water bottles, those sorts of things so that you can streamline that whole getting out the door and getting to school on time.

Dorte Bladt: That would be a really good thing. When we're talking about school readiness that would be a good routine to start maybe before school starts.

Kate Highland: Before school, yes, but by the time they're 4 ½ or 5, they're old enough to know where the bowl and the spoon is - the Weet-Bix and the milk. I mean, it can just be that. At least if they've got something decent in their stomach, I find they can then concentrate, and those few hours to start the day are the peak learning times.

You’ll find that teachers will do more creative things in the afternoon because we're all a bit slower and all a bit more tired, but peak literacy and numeracy time happens first thing in the morning, especially in the younger grades. So if they come to school and they're already exhausted, it's really hard to concentrate. So food choice is very important. Look, I think fruit and sandwiches just will get you through the day. Good quality bread and fillings that are just a bit different, a bit unusual. I often see things that I think, “gee, I haven’t thought about that.”

Yoghurt is one, but if you're putting milk products, they certainly need one of those little freezer block things that will keep it cool, and I always prefer to see children drink water rather than anything else. Everything else - fruit juice and cordials full of sugar, so water is fabulous, and if they can't then we've got bubblers here.

Dorte Bladt: So I guess what you're saying is there's nothing really new and exciting. We all know what basic good food is, but, again, remembering that it's not just for health and for lack of weight gain. That's not the only thing.  It is also so they can actually concentrate.

Kate Highland: It is for concentration, yes.

Dorte Bladt: All through the school day.

Kate Highland: Yeah and I find children now want to eat fruit because of Fruit Break. I've only got to look at my class and say, “oh, yeah, your strawberries look nice,” and four more children have got strawberries the next day because they... and they like that community sharing of food that all human beings like to do. We all like to sit and eat together.  So doing that in the classroom... I know at my school the teachers read, the primiers reading challenge books. So we're reading picture books to them. So they have this really relaxing time.

And I say to them at the end of the year, “what did you really enjoy doing?”

And it is, “we like Fruit Break. We like Fruit Break because you read to us and we're just a bit relaxed.”

But we're together and it's 10 or 15 minutes of eating healthy food, drinking water.

Dorte Bladt: Healthy food together.

Kate Highland: Yes, eating it together so it's a really fabulous thing to do. Often, when they're in the playground, if it's lunchtime, we always supervise lunch, and we'll say, “where’s your lunch?”

“Oh, I've eaten it.”

“Okay. Show me your lunchbox.”

And they often haven’t eaten it because they want to play. So things that are appealing to them, although children will say to me, “oh, but I don’t like Vegemite.”

And I'll say, “well, I don’t make your sandwich. Make sure you tell your Mum. Make sure you tell your Dad that you would prefer something different.”

So ask them! Ask them what they want because if they don’t like Vegemite, what's the point of giving them one every day? Or whatever it is, if they don’t like ham and salad or something. So I guess try and find something that they want to eat, then monitor it so that if they bring you home a full lunchbox, you're giving too much, or an empty lunchbox, maybe it's too little.

Dorte Bladt: Yes. I suppose the other thing is also we know how sick we get of the same sandwich every day. I suppose that it's also a little bit of variety that might be good for a kindergartener or a school-age child.

Kate Highland: Yes and think about just cooking a bit of extra something at night time so that you've got that leftover to put on a sandwich. I think that's a great way to use that up and it teaches really good skills for the future as well about food.

Nobody at school shares food. Most schools request that there's no nuts, peanuts in particular because of allergies. I know it's really important that you communicate with your school if your child has anything, any issue. Any hearing issue, vision, fine motor, which is things to do with scissors in the hands, really, like cutting and pasting and colouring in, or any problems with big movements. If they're wriggling around or having trouble crossing their legs. One thing I know I always do is stop children from doing what I call a W-sit, which I know would be something that you would talk about because of what that does to their spine and their whole sitting, and I can tell the children that purposely choose a W-sit often will have trouble with tasks.

Dorte Bladt: Yes. There's a chicken and the egg in that.

Kate Highland: Yes, I'm sure there is. So that's a really important one to do too. So there's a lot of things that people can do, but I guess the whole idea about talking about school, playing at being at school, even talking about things, having little things like there might be a spot on the fridge where you can put their work. I know that when I was at school, someone complimented a piece of art I did and my mother put it in a frame and stuck it on the wall, and it stayed there for years. When she passed away and we were at her house, I found it, and it was so touching it was still in the frame. I have it up in my house now.

A couple of days after I put it up, it's just in my study, at the back, my husband looked at it and he said, “what's that?”

“Well, you know what? I painted that when I was in Year 4,” and I remember it. Those things are really... making memories is really important.

Dorte Bladt: Yes and it also seems for the time that that is valuable. It was time well spent and it's not just wasting... as if you could waste your time in school, but it is valuable time.

Kate Highland: It is. That's exactly right. They feel very safe and secure and after I'll say, “you know, this is where your Mum and Dad want you to be today. Do they want you to be doing this?”

And they’ll go, “oh, no.”

That becomes a bit of a reminder of what your behaviour looks like. So it is very important that they know that they're in place and that they feel safe and secure.

Dorte Bladt: So are there anything, any suggestions for parents, like going into, let’s just say, the last week before school? Making sure that this is going to be a great new year. Anything that you could suggest just for that short week or two or however long that you think is the right sort of timeframe.

Kate Highland: Look, advertising-wise, it starts as soon as Christmas finishes. It's the “back-to-school, back-to-school,” which freaks all the teachers out, I have to say. It's December and January, but so you've got the whole build up with buy the school shoes, make sure you've got the uniforms, that sort of thing, but I'd start having the conversations about "what was good about last year? What are you looking forward to?"

I really think they’ll say, “Oh, well, I will see my friends,” or "I will see so-and-so."

Try not to talk too much about who the teachers will be because often staff change. They move or they seek other positions or whatever, so you can't guarantee who our staff member will be. We tend not to tell children you’ll be in so-and-so classroom of whatever in case it changes because you don’t want anxiety about that at all.

So it's about "you will be back there". You might change and some schools it's really difficult to organise because of new enrolments, so a lot of schools the children will return and they’ll stay in their class for a day or two from last year so that we can get the organisation correct or as good as we can get it. So that happens that you just go back into the same class for a day or two with the same teacher until we can move on and sort things out, because with new developments in building and that sort of thing, it's very tricky to sort that out, but certainly have those conversations and just talk to them about, “is there anything that you would like me to talk to the teachers about or not?”

Often children will say, “no, no, no. Don’t go talk to them.”

But just about what the expectation is. I expect that you'll go to school. I expect you'll listen to the teachers. I'm sure you'll do as you're told. I'm sure that you'll have a lot of fun. Some days will be tricky. Some days will be a little bit hard, but know that you’ll come home and you’ll talk to us about that. I know, certainly, in my house, it was soon as they walked in the door of an afternoon, “now, what did you do?”

“Nothing.”

“You didn’t do anything?”

“No, I played.”

And you think, “they don’t do much there.”

Then we’d sit down to have dinner and then it would come out. They just needed that couple of hours of downtime before dinner to sort of maybe process it or think it through and then I think the questions at dinner were different. It wasn't "did you have fun today" or whatever. It became "who did you play with" and "what did you do in maths." Something that had an answer to it.

Dorte Bladt: Open-ended.

Kate Highland: Yeah, open-ended. Not just yes and no type things. Once you start telling stories about your day, you'll find that they’ll open up then.

Dorte Bladt  I think I read this study on that. They were saying... I can't remember where I read it but it was something about Mum or Dad starting dinner with the story of their day and then, like you were saying, the stories will be light so it ends up becoming that whole conversation and everyone likes to contribute, but it's not that we necessarily want to be the one that has the monologue. I think often it becomes almost an interrogations, "so what did you do today, who did you play with today?" Whereas if we come home and say, "you wouldn't believe it, so-and-so did such-and-such with birthday cake and we had"... whatever. The story that you can come up with, they like to share their side too.

Kate Highland: I think the other thing that parents can do is I'm sure there are things in their day that don’t go right. Certainly, you edit what you say, but let them know that you're a human being and that you do have days that aren’t all sunshine and roses and rainbows, and that it's tricky  Some days you're very tired or you might have had something go wrong that was difficult and you're worried about it, and what you're going to do about it.

“Well, I'm going to talk about it”, “I'm going to have a good think”, “I'm going to make a decision”, “I'll seek advice”.

But those sort of life skills that everybody needs, you know, how to make a decision, those sorts of things we all need to know about. Let them see you as an example of how to make that and the example of, "of, let's finish now and I'm moving on. I'm letting it go." I think they're things that parents can do that teach their child. We try to do that as well but, obviously, teachers don’t have the same rapport.

Dorte Bladt: The circumspect, like you were saying earlier, that parents are a child’s first teacher.

Kate Highland: Yes, that's right.

Dorte Bladt: And second teacher and third teacher.

Kate Highland: The most important person and because the parents are imparting their values and their beliefs onto their children and so you want to do that, but you want to give them skills in resilience. You want to give them skills in organisations and getting along with other people.

Sometimes at school, children will get upset because somebody doesn’t like them and I'll say to them, “well, you don’t have to play with everybody. You don’t have to like everybody.”

And kids are really surprised when I say to them, “well, you know, you can choose who you play with. As long as you're being polite to people and being pleasant, you don’t have to be best friends with everybody. Nobody is.”

And it doesn’t happen in adult life, why should it happen in children’s lives?

Dorte Bladt: It's that confidence, though, isn’t it? If you're always being told that you have to be nice and you think you have to play with everyone because that's easier for us adults.

Kate Highland: Yes, it is. But we'll say to children, “to resolve your conflict with other children, what you should do...”

We teach them how to do it, how to stand up to someone that they might think is bullying them, and to use words.  Or to put their hand up and say, “please stop. I don’t like...” then say what it is the person is doing. Most of the time, everybody else respects that. Occasionally, you'll get someone who’ll be annoying, and that happens a little bit where “they're singing in my ear. I've told them not to sing in my ear.” You know? A bit of cooperation here would be good. But we do train them to do that, to be able to verbalise and say what it is that's upsetting you.  As well as go and tell the teacher, and that's very important, but trying to solve those little things yourself.

A lot of that happens at home. I mean, brothers and sisters playing. The situation is different at home. You can have kids wrestling on the floor and that's all good, hopefully, but at school, that's not. So there is a disparity, really, between what could happen at home and what could happen at school.

So sometimes the rules are different and I guess that's another thing to talk to your kids about is the difference in rules. There are different rules when you go to a swimming pool. There are different rules when you go to a shopping centre or whatever. There are different rules for every facet of life that we all have to learn because sometimes kids will say, "oh, but you know, my Dad said I can thump him." Sorry, that's not going to work at school. Won’t do with that one. I'm sure Dad didn’t or if Dad did, maybe he needs to talk to me but we don’t... that retaliation thing is gone, hopefully, in most kids but that's something you need to learn about school is that the rules are different.

Dorte Bladt  Excellent. Well, I'm sure lots of parents could get some good take-homes from that. I really appreciate your time, Kate.

Kate Highland: Thank you.

Dorte Bladt: And good luck with your holiday!

Kate Highland: Thank you very much!

Outro:  The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the guest and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Family Chiropractic or the host.

by Family Chiropractic

FF 05: 'Thoughts on Birth' with Newcastle doula She Births educator Nichola Kinnane

Discover the magical benefits of a natural birth with local doula, Nichola Kinnane, and our very own Newcastle baby's chiropractor, Dr. Dorte Bladt.

Nichola talks with us about supporting couples with knowledge and skills for birth.

Intro: Flourishing Families with Dr. Dorte Bladt, the Switched-On Kids chiropractor and her passionate friends sharing the secret of inspiring wellness to help your families thrive.

Dorte Bladt: I'd like to welcome Nichola Kinnane to our podcast today. It's lovely for you to travel down and have a chat with us today. Welcome.

Nichola Kinnane: Thank you for having me, Dorte. It's lovely to sit down and have a conversation.

Dorte Bladt: Excellent. So tell me, who are you, Nichola?

Nichola Kinnane: I am a doula and also a childbirth educator. At the moment, I'm offering the She Births course which is a holistic, evidence-based childbirth education course in the Newcastle and mid-north coast areas.

Dorte Bladt: Excellent. So just for our listeners, just tell me what is a doula?

Nichola Kinnane: A doula is an independent, professional childbirth support person. Generally, a couple or a single mother might employ me at some stage during her pregnancy and then you are on call for the pregnancy two weeks before the due date, two weeks after the due date, and you give support during that time and then attend the birth and just offer tools and techniques and support in whatever way that looks to be for the couple or for the mother.

Dorte Bladt: So what's the difference between a doula and a midwife?

Nichola Kinnane: A midwife has been trained and is a nurse and a doula is an extra set of hands. We offer all those things that you might need, where there's someone to hold the bucket while you vomit, will give massage, acupressure and even emotional support, and support for the dads as well so they can really be involved in the birth and help to facilitate a beautiful experience for all of you there.

Dorte Bladt: Excellent and how does that then fit in with the She Births experience that you offer?

Nichola Kinnane: Yes. Well, I trained as a doula about 10 years ago and since then I've had two children of my own. I was kind of dipping my toe back into the birth world and wanted to find something else. I had a diploma in counselling as well and I wanted to find something else that I could incorporate into that work that was still in birth and I found the She Births course which was developed by Nadine Richardson in Sydney, and it seemed the perfect addition to what I was already doing and I've really enjoyed sharing with couples so far.

The thing that I love about it is that in my experience training as a doula, I heard so many birth stories and listened to women, what they planned on using the birth they hoped to have and then I was able to also hear their experiences afterwards. In my training, I was going to birth classes with the women and going to mothers’ groups as well.

What I heard during that time for the year that I was doing my training is that women have really diverse experiences and you never know exactly what you need on the day of your labour, and with all the things that you think you want, you want the candles and you want the massage and then suddenly you're in labour and it's, “don’t touch me, don’t come near me!” You just want to be in that corner by yourself birthing but have the right team around you to support you and She Births is a fabulous course because it offers an opportunity to explore all of the tools and techniques that you might need. It also exposes your birth partner, whether it's a dad or a partner or even a doula that you might bring if you're a solo Mum, it exposes them to the tools and gets them very comfortable with what might be required of them and kind of demystifies birth, if you like.

They're tools that we offer and that we teach, many of them evidence-based or just even anecdotally-based. We know that they work and then the more tools that you have, the more knowledge you have, the more confident you are on the day to take what you need and leave behind whatever you don’t.

Dorte Bladt: So just to clarify for me because it's 500 years since I had kids, give or take. The She Births is set up as a certain amount of time that you spend going through techniques, like you said, "I would like massage and candles" but I end up in the corner. So are you going through the different scenarios into this may be what you're thinking now and this could be another option, or this is also something you could look at? Is that how it's set up?

Nichola Kinnane: Yes. So over the weekend, we look at three main pillars or components. We look at knowledge and the idea that knowledge is a powerful force and it helps to eliminate fear. So the more you're prepared with the actual understanding of the body, the better prepared you are when you're in that process to bear where you really let go and to trust in what's happening and trust in your team.

The next area that we focus on is your inner knowledge or inner strength and that's what women have been using since the beginning of time, the breathing and the movement, meditation, visualisations, more relaxation-based methods as well as active birth principles. So how you move, the positions you might be in, your yoga, etcetera, and then you have your other resources that you draw on and the biggest one is going to be your partner and your team, the midwives or doctors that you have or your doulas. But then also creating a lovely environment and then you come in with the massage tools and techniques or acupressure, and learning all of those components is really important to facilitating a really beautiful birth no matter what unfolds, no matter what kind of corners you come in with or what happens, the changes in plans that happen along the way.

The more prepared you are - and you can use those tools at any point in time - the more prepared you are, hopefully, the better that you’ll feel, the more empowered you'll be because you'll be an active part of the process.

Dorte Bladt: Right, that sounds good. So you said that you became a doula 10 years ago and then you've had a bit of time off with your children. What is your experience getting back into it now? I mean, we hear so much that we're becoming more technological and there's more intervention and there's more fear, maybe as time goes on. What is your experience in that, like from a birth point of view, in the trends over the last 10 years, if any?

Nichola Kinnane: I think there's a lot of different trends going on and I feel that for me and my experience, what I thought birth was before I had attended a birth as a doula was very different to what I saw in the room and I think that there's a lot of fear, like you said, based on birth stories that we might be hearing, or media, how it's portrayed. Often, it's really funny to see someone rushed in a cab to a hospital in the movies but it's not necessarily like that. It can be extremely spacious. It can be days and if I hadn’t had the experience of being trained as a doula before I had my own children, I probably would have just done a very - not a conventional route - but I might not have been empowered in my choices because I would have been doing what I thought everyone was doing.

But as a doula, I had explored the avenues. I've heard stories of women who had explored other avenues themselves and it created possibility for myself that I could have something that looked different. My birth could be different. My experience of parenting could be different. That was really exciting and I'm really glad that I had done that training.

Dorte Bladt: You mentioned before when we were talking before we started the podcast that you look a lot at the mind-body connection. What's your experience with that?

Nichola Kinnane: Yes. In my early 20s, my mother had taken me to a chiropractor who worked with kinesiology. I remember being very sceptical of this process, not really understanding why I was talking about feelings and thoughts that I had been having when I was eight years old, but after a period of time, I realised that my body felt much better and my mind also felt much better from working with the two together, so I became very curious about this mind-body connection.

It's something that really excited me in the She Births courses that we look at mind-body connection and how you process your thoughts and feelings and how that can translate into the room and start to uncover, and really it is a self-reflective weekend as much as it is a birth course. It encourages couples to look at their own beliefs and attitudes and work from there to be active in the process for themselves.

Dr. Dorte Bladt: Fantastic... and you mentioned that it's evidence-based?

Nichola Kinnane: Yes, it is evidence-based, so a lot of the tools and the techniques we have the corresponding research that backs up why we would be recommending that. Then it is also the only course in the world that's been scientifically verified to lower epidural by 65% and the caesarean section rates by 44% and it has a resuscitation reduction rate for babies at 53%. So it really improves outcomes for mothers and babies as well, and that research paper was published in the British Medical Journal in 2016, so if anyone is interested they would see it on the shebirths.com website or could probably search for it in Google.

Dorte Bladt: So what's your actual background? What did you do before you became a doula?

Nichola Kinnane: Before I became a doula - well, coming off the experience with the chiropractor and the kinesiologist, I ended up training as a holistic kinesiologist. I felt very passionate about the mind-body process and working with the body to relieve stress and to help the body function a little bit better. Then I worked as a kinesiologist and then I started hearing this word ‘doula’ which was quite surprising for me because I had no friends with babies, I have no nieces or nephews and then suddenly I was thinking, yes, I'm going to be a birth support. I'm going to sit with women and hold babies.

I thought about the process... It was beautiful and it was such an eye-opening experience, something that I had never experienced before, but the kinesiology and then working as a doula and then doing my training as a counsellor and then, now, the childbirth education all works in together and all that knowledge is the foundations building up to where I am now.

Dorte Bladt: So you mentioned that you potentially go to birth classes with people, or used to, anyway. What's the difference between the normal antenatal classes that I think most of us do going through and preparing for birth and the She Births Program? Is there a difference?

Nichola Kinnane: Every course is definitely different. There's a difference between the independent childbirth classes and the hospital classes. I haven’t been to every single class available so I can't really speak as to what the specific differences are between that, the She Births class in my experience and in the classes I was doing as well about 10 years ago, so that was when I was training as a doula, and I think that there are more tools and techniques that have been incorporated since then, but a lot of them are the eastern wisdom and tools and techniques along with the western medicine have been combined pretty well.

I did go to one class when I was having my second child just as a refresher but I went through the hospital. My experience and this is definitely not everyone else’s experience, it's just simply my experience, was that I didn’t feel a connection to the process of the birth which was what I was really looking for, I guess, to reconnect to the baby.  You're about to give life to something and you're with your partner and your family is going to change, the dynamics are going to change. I was really looking for that connection from the class which is something that I didn’t get... but that's not to say that women and couples don’t get that.

Dorte Bladt: Yeah. You also mentioned I think that you do some following-up. Is that with the doula? I can't remember now, but the following-up after the birth, so when there is that change in family dynamics. How does that fit into what you're doing?

Nichola Kinnane: As a doula, what I would do to postnatal visits and just check in. There are some great antenatal doulas as well. So for anyone that doesn’t know what that is, you employ a doula who would be coming in post-birth, as opposed to a birth doula, and supporting you during that time.

In the She Births course, we look at settling. We also look at breastfeeding and conscious parenting too, so the choices that you make in the birth are really about the three of you and those choices can then laid on when you take the baby home and how you want to live your life and recreating your life in that sense.

Dorte Bladt: It is recreating it, isn’t it?

Nichola Kinnane: It is! It is a process and it is a lot of change. I think going slowly and just doing the best that you can be doing. Then if something is not really working, just being curious as to why it's not working and knowing that you can make decisions and it's your baby, it's your relationship with your partner and that's possible.

Something that down the track I'll be looking at doing in Newcastle is Soul Mama Circles which is mothers’ groups for women. The women mostly will be coming from the She Births Groups that I'll be running, but then if other people are interested in joining it or are like-minded - of course, we talk about settling and sleep and poo and all those sorts of things - but we really want to focus more on transitions and talk about the meatier stuff in there too.

Dorte Bladt: Do you find it, I'm probably incredibly cynical when I say this, but does that whole change in the western lifestyle where we keep talking about Mum and Dad and baby or Mum and Dad and children, do you feel that there has been an increase in the need for people like a doula or a support person or She Births because we don’t have aunties, we don’t have cousins, we don’t have grandparents? We don’t have that exchange of wisdom through our wider community. We do sort of end up on our own, as in, "oh my goodness, now I’m a Mum, how the heck do we do this?"

I remember feeling that.  Again, it's a long time since I had kids but what are your thoughts on that?

Nichola Kinnane: I think that there definitely has been a change to being the nuclear family and not having as much community. Also, people have been moving from other areas and so they might not have family close. There are services out there, for sure, that you can call on to support, but often people don’t even know where to begin.

So it's the middle of the night and your baby is screaming and you're not too sure what's going on, but you feel like the breastfeeding is not really coming together. A lot of them might not know that there's a breastfeeding association hotline that you can use 24/7 and it's free, or that you can have doulas come to your home or you can have someone to come and help settle your baby so you can go to sleep early, and that the community centres have nurses that have lots of wisdom there, too.

So I think that it's a balance of having Doctor Google at your fingertips where you can find out everything or be overwhelmed by that then also be isolated, but just because you have more access to knowledge doesn’t mean that you're more connected in that sense.

Dorte Bladt: No, you're probably getting less connected because you get overwhelmed or it could also be and then suddenly you start thinking that this is really bad.

Nichola Kinnane: Yeah. So I think that having a few great practitioners, whether it be a chiropractor or anything that works for you, someone you connected with before you have children and then you continue that relationship afterwards just so you have resources at your fingertips, it's better to have that sooner rather than later for sure.

Dorte Bladt: That makes sense, doesn’t it? It is about using your community, using your friends and being able to be vulnerable enough to reach out and say, “oh, my goodness. I feel a little bit out of my depth,” and reach out.

Nichola Kinnane: Yes and also friends and family or anyone just knowing that giving someone time with their baby is really, really important but also it doesn’t take much to text and check in and say, “we’ll drop a home-cooked meal at the door,” or anything like that.

Dorte Bladt: That sounds all right. Can I have one of those?

Nichola Kinnane: Yes, me too.

Dorte Bladt: So just to keep this a bit light-hearted, is there a particularly funny experience that sticks out in your mind that you may have had in your years either as a She Births facilitator or as a doula?

Nichola Kinnane: Yes. I think that something that I think about and I share with my couples is the first She Births Course that I did with Nadine when I was just sitting there and teaching with my training. She was teaching and it was... you go around and you have your introductions. One of the couples - it was their turn to share who they were and why they were there and everything, and it got to the dad and he said, “well, this morning I thought I was going to Bunnings and I was brought to She Births and I found out that I'm spending two days in a childbirth education class.”

But he did it! He stayed the whole weekend and he was right into it doing all the massage and everything else. I just love that story because, often, the women, they're having this experience. They're growing the baby, they're online, they would have read the website ten times and then checked my profile as a She Births educator. So things like, “what has she done,” da-da-da. The dad’s kind of might have some form of... you know, they're right there with their partners. Other times, they sort of don’t know what they're going into, but any guy that goes to a course called She Births has to be a kind of pretty cool guy.

Dorte Bladt: Nothing wrong with Bunnings.

Nichola Kinnane: Nothing wrong with Bunnings. I just thought, okay, just...

Dorte Bladt: You can stop there on the way back.

Nichola Kinnane: Yes, you can definitely stop there on the Sunday night.

Dorte Bladt: Do you have any advice for some of the Mums that may be listening to this on our podcast?  Something that you feel makes a big difference in that whole getting ready to create life.

Nichola Kinnane: I think the biggest piece of advice that rings true for me at the moment is to be curious and to be open to the possibility of things being different and to trust your intuition around that. So don’t be afraid to question the care that you're getting because you want to build a solid team with all your caregivers, doctors, midwives, doulas and partners. Make sure everyone is on the same page and be open to the possibility that you can have a beautiful birth no matter what that looks like. It can be very different for everybody and the women that come to She Births and do the courses, they might be wanting a totally natural birth with no intervention at all. They might be electing to have an epidural, even elective caesareans - you can still do the course and use all the tools and techniques. A beautiful birth is one where you feel empowered in yourself and as a couple and as a family. So be open and curious about the possibilities out there.

Dorte Bladt: Perfect. Thank you so much for your time today. Just to clear this up so people know - tell me again, who are you? Where are you from? Where can people find you?

Nichola Kinnane: So my name is Nichola Kinnane and if you want any more information about the She Births Course, you can look at https://shebirths.com. At the moment, I'm offering the courses in Newcastle, in Charlestown, and as a doula, the doula directory has lots of great doulas in the area and my details are up there too.

Dorte Bladt: Excellent. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate you coming down today.

Nichola Kinnane: Thank you, Dorte.

Outro: The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the guest and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Family Chiropractic or the host. Brought to you by Family Chiropractic Centre Charlestown, serving the families in Newcastle, Lake Macquarie and Charlestown.

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