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?

i have some issues with the social aspect of NCT- the cliqueness, the convenience friendships, the competitive parenting etc- but overall, i think we owe them a huge deal as a campaigning and lobbying organisation, and as a fairly wide reaching educational network.

i come from a country where there is nothing like it. your pregnancy and your birth are "owned" by your doctor. antenatal classes consist of booking an appointment with the anesthetist for an epidural. most women (with exceptions in some big cities) either opt for a c/section (after being told by their doctors to do it), or undergo routine episiotomies, standardised inductions, fundal pressures type things to expel the baby, labouring strapped on the bed etc.

i am fairly sure that if it wasn't for the NCT we'd still be there too.

you don't have to go to NCT classes to feel the benefits, as thanks to their efforts over the years a lot of their approach has filtered down the nhs and most hospitals and councils now run some basic antenatal and postnatal support/classes/groups.

I haven't had time to catch up on the entire thread, but thought I'd stick in my tuppenceworth anyway.

FWIW, I am a volunteer for the NCT. I took on the membership secretary role when nobody else wanted to do it. I have three children, two of them are under two. I am teaching myself to use MS Access to try to manage the database of 500 branch members. Our new Chair also has two children under two. The local newsletter editor has three children, two of whom are under two; in fact one of them is just a few weeks old and she worked her socks off to get the Spring edition out a few days before her third child was born.

Some of us on the committee run a local playgroup. We find it hard to find people to be "local contacts", you know, the people who run the teas in their own time, often in their own homes at their own expense. We try not to be cliquey. We invite the whole membership to committee meetings and sometimes get replies saying "please take me off your mailing list", or "can you just let me know when you're planning a branch event", yet nobody wants to put their hand up and say, "There hasn't been a branch event since I joined. Could I come to the next committee meeting and we can talk about organising one."

We have three breast feeding counsellors who gave up countless hours over YEARS to train for their role, which they fulfil unpaid. Their HOME numbers are on the branch website. Some of them visit our playgroup and do drop-in sessions. (A good use of your £39 per month to train people like this, I would have thought.)

Many of our members get their newsletter late because between me trying to wrangle the database, delivering boxes of said stuffed envelopes to local contacts and those local contacts finding the time to traipse round vast areas delivering them, yes, it is invariably delayed. Where we don't have a local contact I have been posting at my own cost so that they get delivered.

I am well aware that "we" are seen as middle-class cliquey types. I was a single teenage mother once. I would have loved to have lived, at that time, in the UK with where the NCT exists and could have supported me. One of my aims is to reach a more diverse "audience" if you will, in our branch.

Most of the parents (yes, we get the occasional stay at home dad and also some nannies/ childminders) who attend our playgroup are not members of the NCT. We leave out membership forms, but don't push it. We have many "tea group" members who are not NCT members. We try to be inclusive.

By all means, make constructive criticism about the image of the NCT and the inefficiencies in the way it's run at the top. Please stop taking a pop at the volunteers on the ground, who are only trying to reach out to people and give them a bit of support in the early days. If you don't like an area contact, (let's face it, you can't like everyone), there's no reason you can't go along to a tea, join the email group and offer to host a tea yourself. We always suggest to members that teas can be held in local cafes or parks if they're not comfortable hosting in their homes. (Trying to be sensitive to the fact that not everyone would have room, for example.)

If you join the NCT and are told there's no area contact arranging teas, you could always volunteer yourself. It's probably the best way of making friends of all.

Phew. Have I said enough?

Oh and finally; our outgoing Chair raised a good point once. She said that when people ask what they "get out of" their £39 per year (only £29 for subsequent years you know), she asks them if they ask the same thing about the other charities they support. This generally yeilds a blank look.

I mean, if you donated £39 per year to Oxfam or Shelter, would you expect to "get anything" out of it? It's a charity and the benefits are the charity fighting for causes like better antenatal care and support for new mums and changing NICE guidelines and the breastfeeding lines and all that stuff. The things you "get out of" the charity like local tea groups are just bonuses. I mean, otherwise I should have got my tea group invite from Oxfam by now, right?

It seems like pregnancy and childbirth and parenting are such hugely emotional and subjective experiences that when people reach out to an organisation like the NCT if they don't get the reassurance they are looking for, whether it is the 'dream birth', or a breastfeeding counsellor who can give you all the time you need (even if you have got through to them on their home phone and at that moment in time they can't give you what you need) or the coffee morning that makes you feel supported, then the whole NCT is dismissed.

As a volunteer-run charity I can't see it ever being able to fulfil these expectations. Especially as the volunteers are mostly drawn from a pool of overworked and underappreciated people already - mums. Not young singletons with time on their hands. Mums.

And I say this as a committed volunteer myself. I want my branch to be approachable and to provide a good range of support and events. I hope we as people reflect our diversity, we've all had a range of birth experience: inductions, caesarians, homebirths, ventouse etc.

But out of 1000 members sometimes only 1 will respond with an offer of help, sometimes none. There are so many things we'd love to do in our area, but we don't have enough volunteers to do it. I think a lot of people assume that each area has an office, staffed by volunteers. But there's just (mostly) mums fitting it around their busy lives.

Also volunteers who run coffee mornings etc have nothing to do with the antenatal classes, except for raising money to pay for the training. So a bad experience with a class doesn't have to reflect on the branch in your area.

And Belinda we change names because we like to be anonymous on MN - I keep lots of personal details to myself for the same reason! I don't want to 'out' myself and anyone who knows me in RL knows about my NCT involvement. I may email you in my volunteer capacity as well...

I can't remember who commented on C-Section, sorry, but wanted to say this.

I am all for natural (vaginal) birth, I think that the section rate is far too high, as is the rate of intervention full stop. however there is a figure that says how many sections are necessary, most of the rest of them are because of a chain of events that leads to needing them. A chain usually started by a Dr or MW trying to push things along a bit, the moment you walk into triage you are on the clock and if you don't do what you are supposed to they will try and encourage you to. I want women to be informed, to be told to use their T-BRAINS and for HCPs to get the patients feelings on matters before they go ahead with a procedure.

I say all this as a mother of two section born babies. My first was a crash section (as in, "we don't have time to talk to you about this, we need to get your into theatre NOW!") with a general anaesthetic (I have a bad back and had taken blood thinners within 12 hours, we also didn't have time to mess around with an epidural) as she was 31 weeks and coming feet first, i found out later that she had already started to deliver her foot which was why things went like they did. They managed to leave my scar unable to cope with another labour. i don't blame them, we were in a crash situation and sometimes you can't take as much care as you normally would (it's like trying to keep someones spine straight in a burning car, alive and paralysed or dead?). My second was born at 35 weeks following 11 weeks of labour (yes you read it right) they kept her in as best as they could, the CTG always managed to turn her which stopped my labour, but then my contractions went off the top of the chart and I was resting at about where I should have peaked. They had to get her out quick. We had a little more time than last time but I still had to have a general.

Both my NCT antenatal class (as I said before one at the hospital, one through the NCT) teachers were really supportive about me having a section. They spoke to me on how to encourage baby to go longer, how to feel like I was in more control at the hospital, what the procedure is (because I had been left with BT after the Crash) for a section, they even spoke to me about how to challenge the decision to do an elective section (which was purely because I asked).

Life saving sections are one thing. So are sections because the mother doesn't want to deliver the baby naturally. But sections because the woman has been badly supported are a totally different thing and they are what's pushing up the section rate.

sorry if I went on a bit there

I think the whole 'pop at the NCT' thing is a reflection of the AIBU section of Mumsnet!

Women often come into contact with the NCT when they are first pregnant - no hormones or emotional outbursts there...
Or when they have their first new baby - with all the rampaging hormones after the birth, coupled with the exhaustion of being a first-time mum - so again, maybe not the time to be rational and measured. [desperate mum emoticon!]

And it's so easy to take sides, taking offence at a single remark, or one group of mums at a coffee morning, seeing them as representative of the whole NCT.

And volunteers are just human after all..

My personal experience of the NCT left me feeling a bit down actually, although it was some years back, so hopefully things have changed. I joined and was really looking forward to meeting new friends, sharing our pregnancies, births and developing relationships with both the mums and their new dc. Unfortunately, I think I got a dud group. There were 6 very middle class career women, who were so uptight about losing their figures, independence and pelvic floor, that the whole session was spent stressing. I used to leave thinking, "Why don't I feel like this?". The NCT host just used to sit there on a bloody birthing cushion tutting and holding a smelly old doll which she used to put in between her legs occasionally and talk about 'presentation'. She also had very hairy legs At the same time I attended our local NHS anti-natal class and to this day meet regularly with 5 other mums and their kids (all aged 5-12 yo). Nuff said ....

Must say I find it very impressive that the Chief Exec of the NCT is posting here, well done for that!

ICANTDOTHAT, that sounds like the group I went to! I wanted to do a course for the same reason as you and because I thought I might meet some IRL likeminded people. It was all anti-breast/ AP comments, which seemed completely opposite to what I expected.