By Cathy Foreman MS, RD
It’s not a surprise that moms and their mental health status are significantly impacted by poor-quality sleep and sleep deprivation. Quality sleep is an important part of good mental health; so, when someone has issues with sleep, it can contribute to both depression and anxiety.
Caring for an infant in the early days of life does require nighttime attentiveness, which is not optimal for moms and their mental health. The postpartum period right after birth is a particularly vulnerable time for moms, as poor sleep combined with hormone fluctuations can impact risk for postpartum depression.
So, women who just had a baby should get more sleep, right?
Yes, that would be ideal! But as we all know, it’s easier said than done. Psychiatrist Nicole Leistikow stated it perfectly in a recent article on postpartum depression and sleep: “Just telling a mother to sleep is as ridiculous as telling her to fly.”
Leistikow stressed that it’s important to reframe our social and cultural messaging, so that moms see “self-care rather than self-sacrifice as the hallmark of a good mother.” But that self-care, in the form of prioritizing sleep, has to happen while an infant’s needs are still being met. Prioritizing a mom’s sleep requires the understanding that nighttime infant feeding is not necessarily a one-person job. (And if you think about it, even when an infant is sleeping during the day, that time is often viewed as a time to “get things done” rather than resting.)
So, it has been suggested that one of the most important approaches for moms to increase quality and quantity of sleep, and therefore reduce risk for postpartum depression, is to recruit help. Recruiting help is the “it takes a village” mindset that includes immediate partners, other family members, friends, and neighbors. During the first few weeks of an infant’s life, people pitching in to help a new mom, even for just a little bit of time, can benefit her well-being and support her need for sleep.
BridgingApps, a program at Easter Seals Greater Houston, focuses on technology and how it can be a supportive tool for everyday life. As part of our series on moms and mental health, we’ve put together a few technology ideas to help recruit some extra hands in the early days of parenting.
There are many crowdsourcing websites designed to bring people together to help others. Think of these as organized, online sign-up sheets created by you or someone close to you. You determine the tasks or help you’d like, include any instructions, and assign time/date slots. Typically, a group email or a text message is sent to selected family, friends, neighbors, and co-workers. The message includes a private link and password to your online sign-up sheet. People receiving this message can then follow the link to your private page. They would log in with the password and see the available sign-ups.
Sign-up slots can be for tasks like dropping off a meal, running an errand, hosting a playdate for a sibling, helping with small household tasks, or sitting with the baby. It is very important to communicate, either on your main sign-up page or within an individual task, any details your helpers should know. This could include meal drop-off instructions, food allergies or diet concerns, favorite foods or restaurants, limitations on social visiting (especially around your new baby), and of course your gratitude for all their help and support. If a close friend or a family member is organizing your sign-up page, it’s a good idea to have a clear understanding with them about the level of privacy you expect and what information you are okay with them sharing. This is especially important if they are sending out group emails, or posting updates on the website or any social media about you and your family.
The bottom line is that people want to help and make “newborn time” easier. But well-meaning offers of “help” often do not result in actual help. That’s where crowdsourcing websites can really be beneficial. People pitching in to bring meals and help with other tasks can lessen the load in the early newborn days, so that there are more opportunities for a mom to rest and sleep.
Some of BridgingApps’ favorite websites for crowdsourcing are below.
CaringBridge transforms your personal connections into instant support to assist someone going through a difficult life change, such as an emergency hospital visit, an unexpected injury or diagnosis, a premature birth, or a lengthy rehabilitation. It’s available as both a web-based application and a mobile device app for Android and Apple smartphones and tablets.
Meal Train is a very user-friendly and free website that guides you to set up a calendar system for meals to be delivered. In addition to setting the calendar up for meal delivery, you can add helper tasks too. There is a section dedicated to writing a paragraph or two for any information you want to share, including meal preferences, food allergies, ideal drop-off time, and more. Once your Meal Train page has been made it is sharable, and is available only to those you have shared access with. Meal Train Plus is a $10 version that offers a little more flexibility for adding more than one meal or activity per day.
Lotsa Helping Hands is another easy-to-use website with an app version designed to centralize and coordinate friends and family.
Sign Up Genius is one of the first online volunteer organization tools. It’s a popular crowdsourcing website that may already be familiar to some of your friends and family.