Nct classes - are they worth it?

[Summer29]

Hi All,
I'm a first time mum to be and am thinking of doing nct classes - but they're quite expensive! Has anyone attended them before and are they worth it? Is it a good way to make new friends too? Any advice is much appreciated :-) x

It depends entirely on the group and the teacher. Which you won't know until you've paid up and attended!

So, that's not really helpful is it?!

My experience was positive. Knowledgable teacher who I'm still in touch with and out of 5 other couples, 1 year on, I still see 4 of them regularly.

I've signed up for NHS classes mainly because I've some experience of the NCT and have decidedly mixed opinions of them, their volunteers and members. And of course in London the price heads towards the £300! I have a friend who is both an NCT antenatal teacher and trainee midwife and she says there is little difference in the classes, but I guess it depends on the hospital. I know some only have one day sessions but the ones I've booked in for are 4 2 hour sessions over a month. So I will see what they are like first.

I've had friends tell me that effectively you are paying £300 for new friends but I also know it depends on the branch.

Only to meet people. I made a couple of solid friends we still hang out with frequently 2.5 years after we had our babies. But I found the actual birth information close to useless, especially as I ended up with a CS (the only coverage out teacher gave us of a section scared the hell out of me as it was incredibly negative, as the NCT are very pro-natural birth). Likewise the BF class, which I had really high hopes for, basically said it'll come naturally. When I didn't, I felt an utter failure. Because they like to be so positive about BF, they didn't cover any reasons why it might not be successful and the emphasis was very much 'there is absolutely no reason why every woman can't BF' (I lost over 2 litres of blood - if I'd known that might be a problem I may not have blamed myself and switched to FF, and it would have been great to know about various methods of increasing milk).

If you can afford the money just to make friends, great. If not, there will be loads of baby groups and stuff at your local children's centre which is free or very cheap. I met loads of people through the children's centre's weekly swimming sessions (£2 a week) and DS really benefitted from getting in the water from an early age too.

I met my best friend at NCT and she was worth every penny! The advice about homeopathy in labour was not

Thank you all so much for your advice! I think I'm going to do it as I need to make some new friends that live nearby and are on a similar situation! Xxx

NCT also has a lot of free activities like their Bumps and Babies meet-ups and parent nights out which you can go along to without becoming a member.

Are your NHS ante-natal classes not local? You could do both (we did..) IMHO, the NHS classes were more useful for us because they had a great breastfeeding nurse on hand, who also ran a bf clinic post-birth. She was the bees knees and did more for me than the NCT/NHS talks.

Your community midwife (do such things still exist??) could hook you up with other mums-to-be in your area as well.

But get hold of the NCT newsletter for coffee mornings and nearly-new sales if you can.

I'm going to do the nhs classes as well - I think the more I can learn, the more relaxed I'll feel about the birth and the baby...
I like the idea of attending swimming /activities too - I'm a bit worried about being at home on my own so much, so the more things I can do the better! X

We were unlucky with NCT classes. We'd just moved to the area do hoped to make friends. Only 2 other couples on course. 1 didn't keep in touch. We became good friends with the other couple but they moved abroad for her return to work. So no guarantee of a group of lifelong friends but good luck to you!

We did both NHS and NCT classes and found both useful in different ways. The NHS ones which we did first were informative and told us things about the labour and our hospital policies, when we could expect midwife visits post birth etc..

NCT didn't really tell us anything we didn't know, but it was great for being able to talk to other couples our age about parenting/birth.

I'm currently 39 weeks and met with 3 of the other girls once before the first births happened, and would envisage trying to meet them all again once all the babies are here. That's what I will value the most.

Totally agree that it's about meeting people. We had a group of 8 couples and bar the one couple that moved abroad the rest of us are still in regular touch and the first children are all approaching 4 now. We still have joint birthday parties, Xmas get togethers and lots of irregular meet ups. So very worth while on that front.

As far as the whole preparation for labour stuff goes- forget it. Oh and the breast feeding session where you weren't allowed to ask anything perceived as negative! In hind sight it's all just amusing, but at the time I did wonder why the hell we had spent so much money to be told such guff! There was one meet up soon after we had all given birth which the teacher came along to and I remember her clear disappointment when she found out that of the 8 of us only one had ended up with no significant intervention at the birth and only 3 were successfully breast feeding.

As others have said , it was great for me to meet others with newborns to be. I think I must have had a 'sensible' NCT teacher who explained all options and was not negative about medical intervention or needing pain relief. I would say I learnt a lot as it was my first. I think there was some competitiveness amongst the mothers regarding who could have a natural birth but luckily I was quite oblivious and uninterested in that and was very glad to make use of an epidural at the time although of course had great plans for a natural birth. Was well worth my money.

Did both NHS and NCT classes. I think the advantage of NCT is you get more time to go over everything. My area only offers 4 hours of NHS antenatal classes. We covered the basics of labour but that was about all. I had positive experience of course leaders from both NHS and NCT. I had heard that NCT are a bit militant about natural childbirth and breastfeeding ( and that seems to be some women's experiences here) but I think this depends on your individual course leader - mine was pretty pragmatic and reasonable.