To strengthen family health from the earliest stage, postnatal care should establish conditions which enable new mothers to balance the care of their infant with their own needs.Ĭomforting a crying baby while coping with personal tiredness can challenge mothers after birth. New mothers often need permission to attend to their own needs, as well as practical support with childcare to recover from birth especially when neonates are fussy. These mothers suffered from sleep deprivation and severe tiredness unless they were able to leave the baby with health professionals for several hours during the night. Getting adequate rest was particularly difficult for mothers striving to provide infant-centered care for an unsettled neonate. These beliefs ranged from an infant-centered approach focused on the infant's development of a basic sense of trust to an approach that balanced the infants' demands with the mother's personal needs. Women's personal beliefs about beneficial childcare practices shaped how they cared for their newborn's and their own needs during the early postnatal period in the hospital. This paper reports on the postnatal hospital experience.
Using interpretive phenomenology, we analyzed interview and participant observation data collected during the postnatal hospital stay and at 6 and 12 weeks post birth. Purposeful sampling was used to enroll 15 mothers of diverse parity and educational backgrounds, all of who had given birth to a full term healthy neonate. We explored how new mothers experience and handle postnatal infant crying and their own tiredness in the context of changing hospital care practices in Switzerland. Yet, routine postnatal care often lacks effective strategies to alleviate these challenges which can adversely affect family health. They often face a combination of infant crying and personal tiredness.
Today mothers rarely enjoy restful days after birth, but enter directly into the challenge of combining baby- and self-care.
According to an old Swiss proverb, "a new mother lazing in childbed is a blessing to her family".
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