Making new mothers a priority

For many women, becoming a new mother is the most wondrous experience available in life. Holding a newborn in your arms, seeing its eyes blink and focus for the first time, feeling its soft skin, watching its first fluttering kicks outside of the womb.

These earliest feelings of wonder are the beginnings of one of the most important relationships there is. Get it right and the benefits of attachment made at this early stage will be felt by your child in its personal and social relationships throughout its entire life.

And yet, being a new mother is not always serene and plain-sailing. In fact, almost all new mothers, especially first timers, will experience myriad anxieties and have a plethora of questions tumbling around inside their heads at any given time. For example, the following list is just a sample of the kinds of questions that are likely to occupy your mind over the first few weeks:

• When should I first bath my baby?
• How should I bath my baby?
• How many feeds should I give my baby?
• How many nappy changes a day is normal?
• What baby clothes should I put on my baby?
• How do I know if something might be wrong?
• Who do I call if I worry that something is wrong?
• When should baby sleep?
• Where should baby sleep?
• And so on, and so on…the list is almost inexhaustible

Not just about the baby

Yes, motherhood brings more joy than you can ever imagine, but it also brings worry and anxiety. Newborns may not weigh much more than a large tub of ice cream but their gravitational pull is so enormous that you will spend the next sixteen years, or so, orbiting their growing planet rather than perhaps focusing on your own solar system. Your child will literally become your world.

But this doesn’t mean that you won’t sometimes feel upset, unwell or lonely; you will still have your own welfare to look out for. But then it should come as no surprise that life’s greatest event, childbirth, comes with a whole set of brand new issues.

This is why, as well as looking after baby, you will also have to take steps to look after yourself. Here at My BabyManual we want to help you achieve this and can provide information and resources in relation to your own health and wellbeing. For example, we can help with all of the following:

• What is lochia and when will I stop bleeding?
• How do I help baby latch on?
• What do I do about sore breasts and cracked nipples
• What is happening to my mood?
• What is postnatal depression, postnatal anxiety and postnatal OCD?
• When can my partner and I have sex again?
• When will my body return to normal?
• What should I be eating?
• When can I begin to exercise again?

Here at My BabyManual we have a site packed full of resources for new mothers and their partners, so they can be supported and prepared before and throughout their journey into parenthood. Read on for help, advice and information from My BabyManual and its expert doctors, midwives, obstetricians, nutritionists and more.