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The doula role has never been more vital. Across North America and around the world, cesarean rates continue to rise, medical interventions are increasingly routine, and parents are navigating a maternity care system marked by burnout, inequity, and fragmentation. Research shows that continuous emotional and physical support during childbirth improves outcomes, shortens labor, reduces unnecessary interventions, and increases parent satisfaction.
Doulas save lives and strengthen families.
Yet, at the exact same time that the profession has grown in importance, the training model that shaped its earliest generation has remained stuck in place. The weekend workshop. Two days. Maybe three. A sprint to certification with a push toward speed over depth. There is a hangover from the outdated and lingering belief that doula work can be learned through intensity instead of slow and intentional integration.
This is not a criticism of the pioneers who formalized doula training decades ago. Their work was visionary. They saw what our health systems missed at the time. They organized, they researched, they advocated, and they gave a name to the role so many grandmothers, aunties, and community members had carried without recognition for generations.
Their efforts opened the door to a movement and we thank them for their work. Like, from the bottom of our hearts!
However, historical context matters. Early doula trainings were not designed to prepare someone with no background for everything a doula now faces. Many early participants were nurses, childbirth educators, or already immersed in perinatal environments. Sessions were designed around comfort measures, emotional support, and an understanding of physiological birth. That made sense for the audience and the era.
But birth work evolved. The world changed. And the weekend training model did not grow with it.
Today, the landscape of birth care requires doulas to understand trauma informed support, racism and bias in healthcare settings, consent and communication under pressure, obstetric violence, perinatal mood and anxiety disorders, queer and trans family support, fertility journeys, loss and grief, and the business and boundary skills required to keep themselves financially and emotionally safe.
That knowledge is substantial. That emotional load is profound. That responsibility is real.
A weekend is not enough. We must say that with clarity and compassion. This is not being shared as an attack but rather as a truth.
The Cost of the Sprint Model for Weekend Trainings
When someone signs up for a short doula training believing it will lead to career readiness, they walk toward a promise that often dissolves the moment they try to practice.
Many graduates tell us they left their weekend training feeling excited, but when they face real labor settings, medical power dynamics, or client fear, they feel unequipped and overwhelmed. Instead of questioning the model, they question themselves. Instead of seeing the gap in the training, they see failure in their body, in their confidence, in their intelligence, in their instinct.
This is an avoidable wound, y’all. It does not make birth safer and it definitely does not make doulas stronger. It does not empower communities and mostly it discourages, breaks hearts, and slows progress. Slowing the progress for reproductive health and justice is not an option – but speeding up the crash course education for doulas is not the solution!
A doula who feels unprepared is not a poorly suited doula. They are a product of a system that confused speed with accessibility. Students deserve time to absorb, practice, debrief, and integrate. Families deserve doulas who are supported, mentored, and confident. Hospitals deserve collaborative partners who understand their environment, their constraints, and their language.
There is nothing empowering about rushing someone into a field without foundation and then offering continuing education at a cost they did not anticipate. That is not accessibility. That is a marketing and sales funnel.
Adult Brains Do Not Learn in Marathons
We also must talk about how adults actually learn. Cognitive science shows that retention decreases sharply after two to three hours of focused instruction. Attention fatigues. Depth declines. Emotion overwhelms.
Doula trainings need to be built around how adults learn. We also want to highlight here that many neurodivergent folks are drawn to birthwork and this model of the weekend crash course does not set them up to thrive and shine.
Layering trauma informed care, anti oppression frameworks, birth physiology, postpartum emotional literacy, and communication skills into one accelerated weekend means most of it cannot be absorbed, let alone embodied. We do not help new doulas by giving them more content faster. We help them by offering time and structure for absorption, reflection, and supervised practice.
Doula trainings still using a weekend crash course model need to change the approach to pedagogy.
The Emotional Labor of Birth Work Requires Preparation
Birth is intimate and unpredictable. It asks doulas to hold fear, joy, pain, transformation, and sometimes trauma. It also asks them to be grounded in systems awareness while offering profound presence and humility. It asks them to be calm in uncertainty, confident in boundaries, and deeply attuned to consent and autonomy.
The environment that many doulas are working within is riddled sources of harm for their clients and themselves.
No one expects a therapist to learn that level of emotional work in a weekend. No one expects a social worker or nurse or postpartum mental health specialist to be field ready after two days. Yet doulas are told they can hold all of this after a brief immersion.
That does not honor the craft and most definitely does not honor the client and family they have been hired to educate, protect and support.
Birth work is serious and it deserves serious preparation.
This Is Not Elitism. This Is Safety and Sustainability
There will be those who misunderstand this conversation as gatekeeping or elitism. They will claim that longer training models create barriers and the truth is the opposite. When training is rushed, marginalized doulas burn out, doubt themselves, or stay stuck in unpaid labor. When education is superficial, clients lose trust, or worse yet, experience avoidable harm. When preparation is thin and weak, the field of birth work becomes fragile,not strong.
Real accessibility means real support.
Real training.
Real mentorship.
Real pathways to income.
Real care for the caregivers.
We can honor the history of doula education while refusing to freeze the profession in a structure that no longer serves birth workers and reproductive justice professionals.
Birth work deserves evolution.
It deserves rigor and love. It deserves everything we wanted as new doulas ourselves. I remember that feeling of standing on the edge of this work and feeling called to help and having no idea where to start.
The least weekend trainings can do for their students is tell them the truth about what folks will get (and more importantly not get).
The weekend doula training era had its role. It opened a door. The next chapter requires more.
We are ready to build that.
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