Come and have a pop at the NCT... how we love to loathe 'em

[volunteervole]

Why does everyone love to hate the NCT? Seriously, why?

Open up the Times today and you have Melanie Reid spouting about homebirths and casually chucking in a nasty reference to the NCT making women feel like crap. A quick search on MN reveals complaint after complaint along the lines of: "Oh the NCT, don't get me started", "Bloody NCT, what do they know?", "NCT bunch of smug bastards make me feel like rubbish", "Fleeced at an NCT sale" etc. etc.

I volunteer for the NCT (hence name changer here) and spend hours and hours each week running teas, putting pregnant people in touch with each other, hosting a website about local playgroups, trudging around in the evening delivering newsletters ... and so on. All for an organisation which seems to be popularly loathed. How is it that the NCT has such a spectacularly bad reputation? Am I wasting my time?

Oh.. just to add.. in my first antenatal group, the /majority/ of the women had planned sections. The group was very supportive about it. I was the only one wanting a home birth and in the end, ended up with a C-Section and the NCT remained very supportive. In fact, I was encouraged to train as an antenatal teacher and get more involved as they said 'Any birth is a birth experience.' I rather wish I'd taken up the training now.

In my second group, there was a stillbirth. It was an awful experience for everyone and our teacher was very kind and spent time talking to us all about it. I'm sure she spent a lot of time with the lady too.

It wasn't until I got involved with the committee that I found out more about issues like cloth-nappies, Nestle and so on. I didn't gel so well with the committee but it was still interesting in a time when I felt quite isolated otherwise.

I'm not disputing anything said on this thread (though I thought my NCT antenatal classes were great - less said soonest mended when it comes to the breastfeeding class, though) but it's worth pointing out that they do some really good work at national policy level. If they didn't exist, they would have to be invented.

I found the classes v good and I am still a member
My local branch seems v cliquey and I've not got involved

The local mag always arrives late so events have already happened by the time I get it. Communication is poor in general but it's run by volunteers

I find the national mag v dull.
Didn't they spend loads of £ redoing the logo recently?

My experience of the NCT was not good. I've been assured (on MN) that my experience is not universal and some people have had a positive experience.

I went in happily saying I'd like lots and lots of yummy pain relief (which they ignored) and they spent hours wittering on about home births and the efficacy of peppermint foot oil during labour. I was busy winding up to go on mat leave and found the whole thing a waste of time - nothing useful learned and much smugness which had to be swallowed down with bad coffee (eyebrows raised at the coffee request).

I totally agree hester and i think the concept is fabulous i just think once the ante natal teachers start taking classes its they seem to be really allowed to inforce their own personal opinions.

Maybe they should change their name to the natural childbirth trust, then there would be no misconceptions.

That is so weird that in some areas it is full of sanctimonious gits and wittering about peppermint foot oil. Here everyone seems to be utterly bending over backwards to be non-judgemental. I didn't make it on an ante-natal course though (no-one returned my call, and in any case they seem so expensive).

Eldon you are right the the national mag is v dull- it is also the same everytime. I think they have just rebranded it too.

The reason your local mags come late is that the national office won't pay for postage out of your £39 subscription, so some poor sod has to deliver them by hand. I am expected to deliver 87 by hand, over a large area (and I don't have a bike or a car), four times a year. It is farking ridiculous.

hester- what is the really good work that the NCT do at a national level? I haven't seen any of it, and MN seems to have a higher profile in the press frankly.

That is very true and something that I found unacceptable@wolfnipplechips. I observed one teacher who literally frightened the life out of her class with horror story after horror story about what could go wrong if you dared to request pain relief. She also wittered on about her own 'nightmare' first birth and then evnagelised about her fabulous second and third natural births. I think they get trainee teachers to debrief their own births these days. This woman certaionly needed a bit of that.

Having said that, I observed some fabulous teachers - just lovely, lovely women, well informed, warm and supportive.

I reported the nutty one for her completely wacky unprofessionalism, btw

Good for you MrsMattie.

In fairness, the NCT does do a hell of a lot of worthwhile campaigning. They just don't provide such easy soundbites for the press as us gobby lot at MN do

Volunteer, can i just ask you a question slightly off track?

If they are a charity and they are run by volunteers what do they do with all the money they make? I don't mean that to sound snotty i'm genuinely interested as they seem to be making a hefty sum. The classes are expensive, i recently sold stuff through them and they take a whopping 30% (i won't make that mistake again) they apparently made £4000 at that sale. The magazine isn't cheap considering its so rubbish and yet i can't seem to find the work the do on a voluntary level.

oh Mrs Mattie x posts you've answered my question.

Its good you had the confidence to report her after all it shouldn't be about fulfilling your own needs or boosting ones own smugness.

It's a bloody good question wolfnipplechips (fantastic name BTW).

I pay a £39 subscription.

For that, in six months I have had one national magazine (hand-delivered).

The rest of the stuff at the local level seems to be entirely volunteer driven eg. writing the local magazine, running events, bf counsellors. The branch magazine has to get in local advertising to cover its production costs, and volunteers are expected to hand deliver it (500 copies, incidentally).

So where does the money go? I have been a member and active on the branch committee for six months, and whenever I have asked I have been told (rather vaguely) that it goes on training breastfeeding counsellors and ante-natal teachers. And I guess there is a telephone helpline to run, and the national campaign work.

I still can't work out why the subscription is so high though. Maybe someone else will enlighten us.

Maybe its a cult.
Volunteer be careful, delivering 500 mags for me would be enough to make me leave .
I'd probably dump them in a the nearest starbucks and be done with it if it were me.

Maybe we could start our own moneyspinnercharity that was less sanctimonious it could be the mumsnet version of the nct maybe the password could be fruitshoot or greggs.

tee hee wolfnipplechips

Whenever I am delivering the mags I always marvel at the lovely Farrow and Ball front door colours in this area. It is usually, not invariably, possible to tell the NCT house on a street as it is one of the nicest.

I guess I deliver the mags rather than dump them in Starberks because I think they have really important stuff in. For example, the current magazine is all about PND and birth trauma, and it is really refreshing and honest about how difficult it can be being a parent and where to get help. Maybe I am a bit subsumed by the NCT cult but I do think it is worth giving up my evenings to get that kind of information to parents and to invite them to coffee mornings so they are less isolated (as I was, in my DS' first year). But then I do feel that the organisation as a whole has such a duff reputation, that it would be more socially acceptable to be leafleting for some revolting political party or similar.

My experience of the NCT can be summed up as follows:

I had 20 hour labour including (not in order) a drip, fetal head scrape (6 people looking up my fanjo for an hour trying to locate a good spot on the baby's head), ARM, an epidural and pethadine. I narrowly avoided forceps.

I finally had an EMCS.

Relating this story to my NCT leader who asked about the birth, it was peppered with "uh huh" "uh hmm" "uh huh" until I got to the bit about having a CS. Then it was "OH NO! THAT'S TERRIBLE! HOW AWFUL TO HAVE A CS!"

I disagreed - the CS was the easy bit

Also, in class several of us asked about mixed feeding and the leader wrote it down then never discussed it ("ran out of time" even though it not last on the list), she said "We'll come back to that later. Now BF etc etc"...

lol
your right, I hadn't thought about the possibility of checking out nice interiors, that i could do.
The NCT need people like you anyway because the best thing about the NCT is that i managed to meet people like me who scoffed at the lentil weavers and liked Farrow and Ball and drinking mojitos so it all came good in the end, could have done without paying for the guilt trip but it was better than the NHS antenatal class where they made me sit with the teenage mums because my DH was busy playingrugby working, Even they had there mums with them i was like billy no mates.

Disclaimer nothing against teenage mums (my own mother was one and very bloody marvellous too) i just didn't fit in.

I've had kind of mixed experiences of the NCT, as people have pointed out its only as good as the people running it.
Antenatal classes weren't very good, teacher was weak at promoting discussion, glossed over some stuff (let's face it plenty of people don't hvae the opportunity for a natural active birth even if they wanted to) and (according to DH) did not properly include Dads. the group didn't gel and most of the dads dropped out.
But they were still a bit better than the free hospital ones. Not much though.
Postnatal group was run by a very skilled woman who was excellent. I found it really useful and it kept me sane at a difficult time. Of course there were some people in it who presented an image of parenting i could never live up to but i tried to ignore them. It was very middle class but that suited me as i am too . no talk about conservatories or foot oil though. but most people were mid 30s or older.
since then i've been to their toddler group but now i am not a regular i find it very very cliquey and hard to fit in. when i appeared once having not been for six months i was pounced upon and asked to do stuff and as i was pregnant and unwell i felt a bit miffed (probably unreasonably so) .

have seen two sides

on the one hand, the NCT is a great force for good in my local community and something that brings people together

and I thoroughly enjoyed running coffee mornings which I did for several years

otoh I found them very prone to claim that they were the only ones to offer an informed choice, that only their ante-natal courses were any good etc

which is rubbish, as we have an exceptionally good, very mother-orientated maternity hospital

and hospital were running excellent courses, which were as open to informed choice as te NCT, but also had the advantage of being run by midwives who had done hundreds of births and seen literally everything

also knew one NCT teacher who was very determined that anyone who had had a caesarian must feel a failure and need counselling; she told me so- I refused to comply

also told me it would all have been different if I had had more choice through proper NCT training- yeah, well if I'd had the choice of not giving birth to disabled children, but the NCT could hardly fix that, could they?

but of course, she was one person. I was also part of the NCT, and I'm fairly sensible

but on the whole, I'd say they're a force for good

just a little unwilling at times to recognise that there are also other forces for good

I signed up for the classes but missed them completely as ds was prem. When he eventually came home from hospital I had a note inviting me to a coffee morning with what would have been my NCT group, all of whom were still pregnant. The friends I made there are still my friends 5 yrs later and were my lifeline in the early days. The NCT breastfeeding counselling service was superb. Someone came to my house to help me at a time when my hv was telling me not to bother and threatening to have ds readmitted to hospital.

I'm another NCT volunteer, I've had a positive experience, my postnatal group were my lifeline after I had dd. I didn't do the antenatal classes. I know set up new mums groups and I always stress that as mums we can only do what we are comfortable with, there's no one right way.

The money the NCT raises goes towards the phonelines they run, the cost of the few people actually paid to work for them, their campaigning work, and to cover the national costs of all the trainee antenatal teachers, breastfeeding counsellors and postnatal leaders. Each branch contributes nationally and then keeps some of the money they raise for local projects.

The booking system has changed recently and is hopefully more professional. If you ring a branch your call is transfered to someone's home (mine included), I fit my volunteering around being a SAHM and some do around being WOHMs. There are no local offices.

I'm well aware of the NCT's cliquey middle class image but striving to move away from it, in my area anyway.

now set up mums' groups. Obviously I can't spell.

Will try to be brief
Positives - the NCT sales
Negatives -

1. Moved areas with newborn so joined NCT to get to know local people. Couldn't find out any information about local events or get togethers.

2. Went to one meeting as it promised a talk on potty training, even emailed organiser before hand to explain my desire to know about potty training, at the meeting they decided not to bother discussing it. Great, so glad I went to all the trouble of expressing milk, organising baby sitter, paying baby sitter ...

3. Magazine arrived 2 months late so all events already happened.

4. Went to the (big playtime / coffee morning?) and nobody said hello. Felt like a numpty. Eventually summoned up courage to ask organiser about local coffe mornings / bf groups / get togethers, left my email, nobody ever got in touch.

I think they are trying to achieve too much. Better to do fewer things well than many things badly.

slackrunner: that is appalling . Sorry you had to deal with such ignorant idiots. Incidentally, does the NCT training cover anything about babies with SN? I would have thought it was pretty essential.