February 10, 2026
The Value of a Baby Prep Class: Podcast Episode #329
In this episode of Ask the Doulas, host Kristin Revere is joined by Alyssa Veneklase, pediatric sleep consultant and co-host of the podcast, to talk all about Newborn Survival and why a baby prep class can be one of the most valuable tools for expecting parents.
We break down what families actually need to know before bringing a newborn home, from sleep and feeding basics to soothing techniques, realistic expectations, and common challenges in the early weeks. Alyssa shares why education before baby arrives can reduce anxiety, build confidence, and help parents feel more prepared for life in the fourth trimester.
Whether you’re expecting your first baby or want a refresher before adding another, this episode explains how a newborn prep class can set you up for a smoother transition into parenthood and why support and education matter just as much as the gear.
This episode is sponsored by Cozy Earth. Use the code GOLDCOAST to receive a discount for up to 20 percent off.
Hello, hello! This is Kristin Revere, and I am here with our co-host, Alyssa Veneklase, today. We are going to chat all about surviving the newborn stage, whether it’s baby one or baby five. For those of you who haven’t heard Alyssa on an episode in a bit, she is a certified sleep consultant, a newborn care specialist, an elite certified postpartum and infant care doula, and of course, a mom and entrepreneur and a realtor. She helps families in so many life transition times! She has so much knowledge and many amazing tips, like swaddle tips and soothing and setting up a nursery for safe sleep. So many good topics to share on the podcast and of course, with our clients.
Welcome, Alyssa!
Hi! I know it’s been a while. We haven’t done a podcast in a few minutes.
Yeah, it has! But your episodes are still some of the top trending ones.
Oh, good. People love to talk about babies and sleep, that’s for sure.
Sleep is the topic and so important. You are definitely the expert on that! I’d love to hear some of your favorite tips that you share with students on how to get through this time, because every baby is different and unique, and even if you have it down with your first baby – I know my kids were so different from each other.
Right. Well, and that’s why I named the class Newborn Survival. So many parents love to tell new parents, “Oh, this is going to be awful. You’ll never do this again. You’ll never do that again.” I don’t know why we feel the need to tell these horror stories. I really focus my class on, you can survive. You will thrive. It will be hard. I’m not going to sugarcoat it; you’re going to have some tough times. But you’re going to get through this and follow your own instincts. Even if it’s your first kid, you know more than you think you do.
So one of the main things I really focus on is asking for help. You and I as postpartum doulas know how hard that is for a lot of moms in particular. Sometimes dads or partners too, but I don’t know if it’s just ingrained in how we’re raised, that we seem weak if we ask for help – but other moms are here to support you! Please ask for help.
The independent American culture really does make it so much different than European culture or Chinese or other areas of the world where family focus is essential. And it does take more than just the mother and the partner to raise a child. And I feel like even in the media – I’m sure you see it as well – there’s a lot of discussion that is almost negative if you get postpartum help, versus birth doula help seems accepted. Whether it’s hiring a sleep consultant or a postpartum doula, we really need to get around that thought that we’re supposed to do it all ourselves and never ask for help from anyone.
Yeah, it’s a bummer when you have a new mom who has a lot of factors, right? Let’s say it’s a new mom who can’t wait to breastfeed, wants to breastfeed for two years and has this whole group of moms who are all in to breastfeeding. Bottles are a no-no. And then breastfeeding doesn’t work for her. So she’s got to change her whole plan. And guess what? She now needs to ask for help. But she doesn’t feel like she can ask for help within this group that she’s surrounded by because they unfortunately may judge her, or she may think they will judge her, for having to bottle feed or even supplement. Like, I can breastfeed part of the time, but I’m not producing enough, or whatever the reason may be. It’s just a bummer when moms aren’t there to support other moms. Just because we made a decision to do one thing doesn’t mean that every mom has to do that same thing for their kid. And like you just said, you might have a plan for kid one, and then kids two, three, and four all have different plans of their own. You really need to be flexible.
Exactly. Whether it’s recovering from a surgical birth, where the first might not have been that way, or feeding issues, as you mentioned. Or you might luck out and baby one is an amazing sleeper, and not so much with baby two.
Yeah. So I just wish as women we felt comfortable asking for help and that other women made it easier for us to ask for help.
Right. And I agree with you that you might find a group of moms who are raising young children at the same time; it could be your mom group. But they might have different philosophies. So at Gold Coast and with all of our classes, it is all about judgment-free support, no matter how you birth your baby, parent your baby, feed your baby, as long as it’s safe, we support you. And that is rare. I feel like family and friends are very well-meaning, but they often use their own personal experience and their viewpoint, and it slants how they’re able to offer advice and support.
Yeah, exactly. And then what do we do as moms? We feel guilty. We’re doing it the wrong way. Oh, my gosh. There is no one right way. Whether I’m teaching the newborn class or my sleep class, there is no one size fits all solution. If there was, somebody would have figured it out and we wouldn’t have all the issues that we struggle with today as new parents. So really, asking for help but trusting your own gut. You as a parent know what’s best for you and your baby, and find those people who do support you, who do offer judgment-free support. And if at first that’s a postpartum doula, it’s your birth doula – it’s okay to tell friends and family who you’re not jiving with, like, yeah, maybe I need help, but not their help. Or give them a list. Mother-in-law comes over – I tell students in my classes to set out a list. If it’s hard for you to ask for help face to face, put a list out. If someone wants to come over, they can check that list. I’m not just going to play hostess. I’m the one who just had a baby. I want you to do dishes or fold my laundry so I can take a shower. I don’t want to make you cookies and tea and then have to clean up after you when you leave. So figuring out ways to ask for help that way.
A list certainly is helpful on the fridge. I tell many of my clients to do something like that. Or I love the new shower trend, and I know you talk about the important things to register for and what isn’t important in classes and in the Becoming a Mother course, but certainly asking for support, whether it’s a meal delivery service, a postpartum doula – but also setting expectations and communicating what you need during pregnancy versus trying to figure it out after. And these nesting party trends are amazing in that friends will help set up the nursery. They’ll come over and they’ll all make freezer meals together, and it’s more helping with tasks versus gifts and that onesie that the baby will maybe wear once or twice and then it’s wasted.
Yeah, that’s amazing. Have your group of friends come over and give you things that you need. Fill that freezer. Help you set up that crib. Whatever is left. Those are the kinds of things that are really helpful. And just knowing that you have those people there for you and not being afraid to call them.
I’m super independent. I was always, even as a teenager, like, “I’ve got this myself.” It’s really hard to ask for help. And then during pregnancy, I don’t really think you and I talk a lot about education. We love educating new parents before – even before they get pregnant and during pregnancy, before birth. And had I had even just half of the education that I have now, I would have had such a different pregnancy and postpartum. Well, not even pregnancy. My pregnancy was great. But the postpartum experience – I didn’t have anyone to call. I didn’t have anyone I trusted to ask questions. I just grew up thinking, I can do this myself. And if I don’t, what’s my problem? This is what I was made to do, right? And I know that’s all such a wrong mindset now. That’s kind of why we did these classes and we wrote the book. You and I just had such experiences with our kids that make us wish we could help others, and this is the best thing we can do. Try to lay it all out there in very real ways. I just don’t like sugarcoating things.
Yeah, and the feedback on your class – I mean, we encourage partners to take the classes, watch videos, learn just as much as our clients. Having your husband or partner take a newborn survival class with you – and you’ve sometimes had just dads only in the class because maybe the mom is a nurse and she’s got it, or she had five siblings she helped raise. Sometimes only the dad will take the class. Or we have a grandparents class, if they’re caregivers, to help them understand the changes in safe sleep and car seat safety and all of the things.
That’s really important. I love when grandparents are that involved and they want to know – maybe their child is in their 30s. That means they haven’t done this baby thing in three decades. A lot has changed. So I love that a grandparent who is going to be in their child and grandchild’s life is taking that next step to say, I want to learn all these things. I want to do this safely. I want to know how to support you as new parents. I just think that’s a really big step for grandparents to take for their children.
Exactly. And they are becoming caregivers because we’re still in a childcare crisis, so it’s important for anyone who’s involved in care for the family, not just the baby – there may be toddlers and other children – to understand the unique goals of the family. I come from a big family, as you know. And my siblings all parented differently, fed their babies differently, birthed their babies differently. So for my dad and stepmom, being grandparents, it was different for every child. Some of my ideas were quite different. And they had to adapt to that.
Well, and I’m glad they did. I know a lot of friends whose parents and in-laws aren’t willing to adapt, and that just makes it really tough on these new parents. So I give a high five to all the grandparents who are willing to do that, to take a class, to step in and say, hey, what do you need? I’m here to support, not to judge. Or not to inflict you with all my out-of-date opinions and nonsense.
Exactly. So what are your thoughts – obviously, you mentioned our online class, Becoming a Mother. Half of the class is focused on sleep and feeding your baby and postnatal preparation, and then the other half is pregnancy and birth preparation. You’ve got your newborn survival class. You’ve got your Tired As A Mother sleep class. Why are people taking classes at a lower pace than in the past, and why do you feel it’s so important, as you mentioned earlier, to get that education before you’re in the thick of early parenting?
I think it’s easy. It’s Google. I have an almost-13-year-old who knows everything. And it’s kind of a joke because she’s only 13; she doesn’t know everything. But oh, my God, she knows a lot of things, because she has information at her fingertips that we never did. So as new parents, you can kind of just google whatever you want, right? Why go take a class if I can just look it up on Dr. Google and ask all these questions? As a doula and educator, I firmly believe that taking a class from someone educated that you trust is really the only way to go. There are so many different opinions and articles. It’s really hard to know what’s true, what’s right. And that’s why in my classes, whether it’s newborns or sleep, I just kind of throw all the options out there. Because like we just said, there’s no one solution. I want to educate you, and here’s all the things. Here’s what could happen. Here’s what your kid may or may not do. And just so you know, if this comes up, you can say, oh, yeah, she talked about that. Alyssa talked about that in my class. And if it never happens, you never have to think about it again. But coming from a resource that is judgment-free and is fact-based is really important, and you just don’t know when you’re looking online. So that would be my best guesses as to why people aren’t taking classes as much. What do you think?
I would agree. I feel like with AI and Dr. Google, people feel like they can get these answers but they’re not human, lived experiences. We have the education and training, as you mentioned, being parents ourselves, knowing all of the resources that are fact-based, to be able to direct our clients to. But people are likely budget-conscious, so they’re looking at the price of a class versus, oh, I can watch a YouTube video, like my kids like to do for all the things that they feel like they’re an expert on. Some of my birth clients like to go in those moms groups, but I do not like the information, being a member of many of those groups, because it’s not fact-based. It’s individual experience. It may not apply to that child, and sometimes the information given in those moms groups is dangerous.
Yeah, you see just a regular old mom giving medical advice to someone about their newborn, and it just about stops your heart.
Right. Things that they are not trained for.
Yeah, sometimes you need to go to your doctor, not a moms group.
Exactly. So having that information, and with your Newborn Survival class, let’s walk through some of the different topics that you cover and how that might be different from Google or a YouTube video.
Yeah. Well, like you said, it’s lived, human experience, right? Not only am I a mom, I’ve taught hundreds of families and worked with hundreds of families as a sleep consultant and hundreds of families as a postpartum doula. I have not only lived this whole parent thing, but I’ve heard the excitement, the joy, the questions, and the hardships of so many other families. So when I kind of put all that together in my brain and say, if I were a new parent again, how would I take all this knowledge that I have and put it into a form that’s easy to digest but also really informative? And I start with, hey, whether you’re a single parent or you have a partner, what is that going to look like for you? Let’s think about that. And talking to couples in the class about your fears; let’s talk about those together, because once you have this baby and you’re not sleeping full nights anymore for a little while and you’re just tired and exhausted and scared and nervous and all the things, you’re not going to be thinking about what your expectations of each other’s roles are. Defining your relationship, what that’s going to look like, what you hope that’s going to look like after the baby is born – some of the really hard relational things that, if a couple really needs to dive deeper into that, I always recommend therapy. But just getting them thinking about things like their relationship and their fears.
What are your expectations of your partner? Because talking about that before the baby is born can be huge because what happens after the baby is born – again, we as women think that partners can read our minds, and then we get really angry when they can’t read our minds, and then that anger turns into frustration, which turns into a fight. I like to start there.
And like you said, talking about things like, hey, what do you need? What don’t you need? Some things are super cute; little baby shoes are adorable. Are you going to lose one in the parking lot as you’re walking to your car? They’re probably not the best thing to spend your money on. What to ask for with baby showers? Obviously, I talk about asking for help. And then I talk about the postpartum aspect. We talk about feeding. I’m not a lactation consultant, so I don’t talk specifically about how to breastfeed, but thinking about breastfeeding and bottle feeding – what do those look like? What are your expectations of time? A lot of times, people don’t realize that when a baby feeds every two hours, say, they think that, okay, I’ve got a two-hour time frame in between, and that is very much not the case. So I talk about, let’s say your baby takes 45 minutes to eat. Now you have an hour and 15 minutes left, but you’ve got to burp the baby. You’ve got to change the baby. Now you’ve got an hour left, maybe. So really, you only have an hour of free time in between each two-hour feed. And if that time frame is shorter, you obviously have less time. Once they get to three or four hours in between feeds, it feels like the whole day has opened up for you. But just kind of those expectations; the stuff that you’re like, oh, gosh, I didn’t think about that before.
And then obviously my favorite topic is sleep. So I talk quite a bit about sleep, and it’s a pretty general overview of sleep because I have my separate sleep class. But again, I just give some general guidelines and talk about some realistic expectations.
And for our listeners who are outside of Michigan, this class and the Tired As A Mother sleep class are all fully virtual and self-paced, so if you have a work schedule that is challenging and you can’t get to a traditional class, or your partner has to watch the class separately from you, you are able to take your time with it, even after baby is born, if you want a refresher on some of the content – it’s different than when you had the live, in-person class, where if they forgot something, they may be able to text you, but they don’t get the full detailed description the way they do with the self-paced format.
Yes. Our classes during the pandemic went virtual, obviously, and it just worked really well to keep them virtual because it’s really hard for a working parent, a new parent, to just really say, yeah, I want to carve out this time. I’m going to leave my house, drive to this place, deal with parking, all the things. It’s really easy, like our kids watching YouTube videos – it’s just really convenient, and if you don’t have a full hour, you can watch a half hour today and a half hour tomorrow and go at your own pace. It’s really convenient. I think students have really liked it.
They have. The feedback has been great, which is why we haven’t changed it. And certainly, one thing that makes your classes unique is that you do offer an individualized follow-up call to go through any questions about the content that they didn’t feel were fully answered in the video.
Yeah, in a face to face class, there’s always a Q&A session at the end, and I didn’t want to eliminate that from my classes because sometimes it’s really important. But I think it’s also different when you’re in a room full of other parents. They would kind of feed off each other and want to ask a question and then someone’s laughing and another person thinks of another question. So it’s a little bit of a different dynamic, but I do still want folks to know that if they have questions afterwards, I’m available. Some just email me and say, hey, this one topic was interesting; can you give me more information on X, Y, or Z. But yeah, a phone call is always available, too.
And your sense of humor and the way the class is structured is very dad-friendly and approved. We’ve had a lot of great feedback from dads. Some classes are just a little boring for dads; they can’t engage, and they don’t feel like it applies. But your classes are made certainly for both the mother and the partner.
Yeah, I named it Newborn Survival because at the time, my husband was really into these survival shows on TV. So kind of to have the class separated into, like – I’m not even going to remember now; like, fire and shelter, food, all the things that we as humans need for survival. So in my class, “shelter” would be, okay, let’s take a look at your home. How do you prepare your home? How do you keep your home safe when this baby comes? And then food – obviously, I talk about feeding and what that looks like. I tried to not gear it towards men, but I’m not an overly girly type of person, so I know how I learn, and I need humor and I need someone talking to me. I don’t want to just read something on a page. So I created the class to hopefully be entertaining and interesting.
I would fully agree. And as far as the online course, Becoming a Mother – anything you want to mention about the baby and postnatal prep portion that you lead? You also have live calls for that one.
I think it’s a little bit more in-depth. My Newborn Survival class is kind of an overview, and I would say for any parent or mom who really just wants to dive deeper into birth and postpartum stuff, the Becoming a Mother class is a little more – I don’t even want to call it intense. You have so much more – there’s different videos you can watch. There’s a whole moms group you can talk to. It’s just in depth. More in depth.
Agreed. And there are monthly calls. And the thing about the content is that our students have lifetime access. We launched that course during the pandemic, and we have people that have had two or three babies. They might leave the course and then email us to sign back up for their next baby. They’re always concerned about sleep, so your sleep portion of the course also covers toddlers. People have questions about toddlers, so they’ll join the calls or email you to set up a private call to only talk about toddlers. So it’s not just infant stage, which makes it very unique in what I have seen from birth and baby prep courses.
Right. Yeah, we try to be all encompassing and think about all the questions that our clients and students have had over the years and make it easy.
Exactly. For our listeners who are interested in the course – we have people even pre-conception who are early planners and take the course and have benefitted from it, as they really want to know all the resources and start budgeting, because we certainly talk about budgets, not only in the course, but in our book, Supported: Your Guide to Birth and Baby. And we do have a discount code, BECOMING50, which will give you $50 off the course. All of our listeners can use that at any time. It’s not time-limited.
Any final tips for our listeners on surviving the newborn phase, Alyssa?
The only other thing I’ll add, because we didn’t really talk about the book much – we wrote the book based on our online series. So if you can’t afford any sort of classes, the book is a resource for anyone and everyone who wants a resource in their hands. It is physical – you can get it as an audiobook, too – but it’s kind of an overview of our course, but such a great resource, and what a great gift for people to give new parents.
I was reading this big, thick book when I was pregnant, and I couldn’t get through it and I couldn’t get my husband to read it. This is much more digestible. Again, it’s what Kristin and I wish we would have had when we were pregnant. So again, our book is a really great resource.
Exactly. And you can find information about any of our classes on our website, on our social media, like Facebook and Instagram. Our book is available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and you can go to supportedbook.com for more information.
Thanks so much, Alyssa! This has been so helpful, and I know we have more conversations coming up in the new year.
Yes! We’ll talk soon!
IMPORTANT LINKS
Birth and postpartum support from Gold Coast Doulas