To do NCT for my second child? (New to new area and have no local friends!)

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I'm new to the area and thinking about doing NCT again for my second baby.

Is that weird?

I did it for my second child. It was called a Refresher course. We were all second time parents so it was structured differently to the normal one. It was cheaper too.

It’s not weird but when I looked into NCT for my second child (I had a 5 year gap) I found the period of time covered by the group was so wide that I thought our babies wouldn’t be very similar in age.

Same area - possibly not.

New area - possibly yes!

I found my NCT lot insufferable, but my friend (miles away) found them indispensable.

Horses for courses!

I'm just lonely and trying to think of ways to meet people!

Maybe a refresher course would be ok.

Maybe even weirder that I'm having an elective section this time too?!

If you can easily afford it then why not? The other option is to go for the more structured baby groups like baby massage, baby signing etc that are all the same participants every week to meet other parents once the baby arrives.

We did, we were new to area and we had an almost 6 yr age gap. When I was first pregnant with DC2 I looked at refresher course, but waited until 20 wk scan to book by which point they were no longer running it so did the full course again (only £30 more).
We met some lovely people but one woman has always made me feel uncomfortable, I got the feeling she didn’t like the idea I’d been through it before - I never rammed my experiences down people’s throats but the instructor would sometimes ask me about it.

I’m still in touch with both groups but definitely closer to my first group. Luckily we only moved 30 miles away so do sometimes meet up still.

Just booked the whole course as York seemed not to have any refresher courses at all!

We did the refresher course in spite of knowing lots of families in the area.

Worth every penny. Partly for the advice and partly for the friends.

It’s a fab idea. My first one was great, my second one less so. It still worth doing. What have you got to lose especially as you are new to the area.

@Franklin12

It’s a fab idea. My first one was great, my second one less so. It still worth doing. What have you got to lose especially as you are new to the area.

Nothing to lose!

We've booked into a fully zoom course this time. We obviously have a child already so an in-person course would mean we couldn't attend together.

Fingers crossed we get a good bunch of people!

The other option is to go for the more structured baby groups like baby massage, baby signing etc that are all the same participants every week to meet other parents once the baby arrives.

In my experience you don't even need structured groups, you just need one decent group which for me turned out to be primarily the local breastfeeding group although I also made tonnes of friends at two or three of the free/extremely cheap church hall playgroups. Am I just amazingly lucky to live in such a friendly area!? We couldn't do NCT as it clashed with shift work (even the weekend ones that they run to try to mitigate that).

I did the refresher course when expecting my second because we'd just moved to a new area, and I'm glad I did because I met lots of people. The range of due dates was about two months apart, whereas for my first NCT course it was only three weeks.

We did a refresher course with my second and nearly all the couples were new to the area.

Although I have met some nice people - actually the nicest meet up I do each week is at a local church that runs a baby coffee morning and amazing it is mostly second time mums.