Birth and motherhood for some women leads to adverse emotional experiences of: low self esteem, depression, extreme disappointment, a sense of inadequacy and failure, and sometimes anger toward their partners and families for not helping or understanding enough and even anger with medical staff if there has been a traumatic birth experience. Issues in feeding the baby or health problems arising in the baby also effect women emotionally. All of these experiences can lead to intense anxiety and psychological symptoms of depression.
It is each women and her partner’s responsibility to be aware of these facts and reduce the negative impacts affecting mothers and babies in the early beginnings of life by reducing stress and planning for healthy postpartum supports and early intervention for depression and anxiety. One of the greatest preventions is good postpartum supports in the first 12 months. It is very important women’s physical and emotional needs are attended to and cared for and efforts are made by couples and families to reduce conflict and stress for the mother and the baby’s early life experience. Early life is remembered for each one of us in the emotional centers of our brain and laid down as templates in our neuron wiring.
Women need opportunities to talk about the birth and motherhood. We need to be having more frank discussions about the postpartum period to enable women to better understand and adequately plan for, after the birth. Our social, economic culture and medical systems do not realistically prepare women for postpartum. Media often over romanticize the experience as being no big deal an easy transition, hurry back to work, multitasking everyday routines and how to make your body look good after birth. This reality is very different for many postpartum moms!