Nct courses? Worth it?

[Littlelegs19]

I'm looking at booking a NCT evening course for my DS. Has any one done one of these And if you have was it worth doing?

Exactly @fairiedemon. I've had friends which says it feels like it's settling them up for failure before they have even started.

Yup, my teacher said that waters never break dramatically. I asked if that's true and she totally insisted it would never happen. Same with giving birth early with your first. Yup, waters broke dramatically and I was two weeks early. On top of that, my baby still feeds every two hours. It was a dumb waste of time and one of my only regrets in life was doing that course.

7 years and 13 children between us now i still see all 6 of my NCT friends. We meet up just adults and with kids. Can't remember any of the content but for me was brilliant. I was very lucky with my group, some of my friends haven't found it the same.

Like some of the others, I didn't find the course content that great. It really focussed on childbirth and breastfeeding (completely ignored bottle feeding). I ended up having an emergency c section and struggled with breastfeeding.

Our course consisted of 8 couples, 4 of the couples formed a clique and the ones that were left (me and my DH were in this group) we bumbled along. However, I did make really good friends with one of the women from this group and for that reason alone it was worth it for me to go.

I also did the NHS one (glutton for punishment me!) which I actually preferred. Just seemed to be more relaxed, although again not impressed by the course content. I also made really good friends with someone on that course, which again for me was worth going as none of my friends had babies and I had pretty much zero experience myself!

Definitely worth it if you get a good group. I'm currently 8 months into maternity leave and would be lost without my nct friends and probably would have PND by now. They have been my sanity savers.

It's completely down to the group you end up with.

Our instructor asked us in the first session what we wanted to cover. So we all said things like bottle feeding/pain relief/when things go wrong. These were given as much time as anything else.

What was lucky though is that 7/8 of the mums still see each other regularly. We all genuinely like one another and have remained friends. But I appreciate that isn't the NCT so much as the fact we happened to click.

We did NCT classes and found them helpful. The tutor was lovely and several of us did baby massage with her after the babies were born. There were 8 couples and although DH didn't especially hit it off with any of the men, the ladies have stayed in touch and we see each other normally 2 x per month. It's nice for ds to have some little friends to play with. In fact we are going for a play date on Friday and to meet a new baby born last week to one of our group.

My best friend described the classes as " a way to buy friends with babies the same age as yours". That's it really!