The importance of the husband being in the delivery room

     Childbirth is an exciting and nerve-racking time for a husband and wife.  Wives go through so many emotional and physical changes and it can be easy for the husband to be ignorant of those changes.  The wife has the advantage of being able to create a special bond with her child as it grow inside her that a husband can never fully understand.  However, unfortunately, so often wives do not include their husbands in the childbirth process before, during, or after the child is born.  Often, wives turn to their mothers for comfort, advice, support, and so on, and exclude the husband.  Such actions can cause rifts in a marriage and can hinder the husband's ability to bond with his unborn child as well as his wife.  Even though there are many things a wife can do to help include her husband in this new experience of becoming a parent (such as letting him feel the baby kick and explain what it feels like, the wife explaining her emotions to him, letting the husband learn to take care of the baby little by little without receiving tons of criticisms), I'll just talk about the time in the delivery room.

     When the time comes for the baby to be delivered, many things can happen that can either strengthen the family bond between husband, wife, and child, or cause a divide to form between them.  For many women, the first thing they want when they are in the delivery room is have their mothers there beside them.  That is understandable, since the mothers have experience in childbirth and will know how to comfort their daughters, how to coach them, how to say things at the right time, and so on.  Time and time again, husbands and kicked back into the corner as mother and daughter go through the experience of childbirth together.  Suddenly, the child is born and the mother and daughter are there sharing in the experience together, while the husband remains in the corner, devastated, heartbroken, and, at times, crying.  He is excluded from experiencing the joy of seeing his child being brought into the world and holding her/him for the first time.  These same couples so often find their marriages falling apart years down the line.

     There is a better, more elevated, loving way for couples to go through the childbirth experience together.  Husbands might not be the best coaches, but they need to learn.  They might not know what to do and when to do it, but they need to learn.  As mothers are kept out of the room and husband and wife go through the process of childbirth together, husbands, wife, and child bond in a greater, more sacred way than they did before.  The wife learns to rely on her husband more.  The husband learns how to support and take care of his wife better.  Both can experience the joy of seeing their child come into the world for the first time.  More love and joy can be expressed between them and husband and wife learn even more fully to become one.

     The experience in the delivery room is only one of many experiences husbands and wives must share together.  When wives or husbands turn to third parties for support, love, comfort, and so on instead of one another, in whatever circumstance, couples are unable to develop dependency on one another and rifts form between the couple.  Husbands and wives need to learn to become one, turning toward one another instead of away.  Sharing in the childbirth experience together is a type of what couples should do always.  As couples turn toward each other instead of away, they develop stronger, happier marriages and families.