Any CNMs that aren't mothers themselves?

klone, MSN, RN · Jan 14, 2011

I work with several. It definitely doesn't seem to affect their care.

arabianeyez83 · Jan 14, 2011

You will be just fine. Male OBGYN's will neverrrr everrrrr experience it hahaaa. I'm sure it would be helpful to have been through what your patients are experiencing, but I definately do not think it is necassary.

elkpark · Jan 14, 2011

This is something you hear a lot about working in substance abuse, also -- that you should have had the experience yourself to be able to help others. The standard response to that is, you don't have to HAD pneumonia to TREAT pneumonia. :)

I went through a grad school program that included a CNM track (I was in a different specialty), and the majority of the direct-entry students in the CNM track did not have kids (I have no idea how many may have had kids since then, but they certainly did not at the time ...)

Journey_On, BSN, RN · Jan 14, 2011

I am a nurse-midwifery student, and I do not have any children, nor am I planning to have any in the near future. I know of midwives who haven't had children themselves, and they are spoken of very highly. I think what matters more is that you have the passion to help women and infants. :)

T3downey · Jan 27, 2011

Thanks for your comments everyone! I feel a little better about it now. I am sure that there are many students that start out in this specialty without kids, but then they have them eventually. I just don't think that it is very likely that I will ever have children, but I am VERY passionate about helping women and their partners thorugh the experience of labor and birth.

Time to really get serious then, I guess! There is nothing holding me back now!:)

elkpark · Jan 27, 2011

I (still) don't understand this frequent insistence that you must go through the experience yourself in order to "really" be good at helping others with it. My specialty is psych, and, believe me, no one has ever suggested that you must have schizophrenia in order to really understand what they're going through and be good at working with schizophrenics.

My subspecialty is child psych, and I have had quite a few people over the years ask if I have children myself, and express surprise when I answer "no." However, my own observation (over many years of practice in a variety of roles and settings -- I started out as a staff nurse, but have been a child psych CNS for many years) has been that not having children is, in many ways, an advantage in child psych -- it certainly avoids a lot of the boundary issues and role conflicts that I've seen some parents (working in child psych) struggle with in those settings.

Go for it!!!

zhang33 · Feb 10, 2011

Check out A Midwife's Story by Penny Armstrong. She couldn't have children.