A healthy way to help start a life

Life is not a do-it-yourself proposition.

We have to supplement instinct and nature with instruction and help from others.

That's especially true with something as natural as having and rearing children.

Help and support for parents used to come naturally too, but in our society that's not always the case, which is why I was interested in talking with Sheila Capestany, the executive director of Open Arms Perinatal Services.

Open Arms provides doulas for low-income families and is about to extend the time its doulas spend with a family to three years.

Doulas are trained to work with a woman and her partner starting several weeks before a birth. They help with planning, stay with the woman during birth, and some help out afterward while the mother is recovering. They teach about birth and infant care and provide the kind of support you might imagine older women in a small village providing.

Capestany is a doula and one of the mothers who founded Open Arms in 1997, but she'd been off doing other work until she took over the director's job at the nonprofit agency a year ago.

Her other interest is public policy and politics. She worked for the Seattle human-services department for a number of years, and was an aide to Councilmember Richard Conlin.

Families, and especially kids, are where all her interests come together.

"I thought I'd be a teacher," she told me, or a sociologist. But while she was attending Whitman College, she got a summer job working at Planned Parenthood in Seattle. That work was about helping to prevent pregnancies and she wondered about the separation between that and the other aspect of family planning, having and nurturing babies.

Capestany went to work for Planned Parenthood full time at 22 and thought the midwives were so cool she wanted to become one, until she watched her first birth.

She realized, "I'm not a medical person. I'm a social and emotional person."

She went back to school and got a master of public health and a master of social work from the University of Washington.

All of her interests, experience and education come together in the new work of Open Arms is doing. Help families and you help the entire community. When children get a good start, schools get children ready to learn, and the community gets healthy, well-adjusted citizens.

Open Arms is training three Somali and three Latina women to be outreach doulas.

Open Arms will hire four of them, who will start working with families this summer. They'll start before birth and continue helping and educating each family for three years.

I expect the result will be healthier, happier parents and children.

Jerry Large's column appears Monday and Thursday. Reach him at 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com.