The arrival of a baby changes your life in every imaginable manner possible–using joys and tribulations in one sentence. You realise that your newborn baby is completely reliant on you for all her needs; feeding, comfort, and sleep time. All of this can be quite overwhelming for you, her mother, which leads to sleep deprivation, which in turn leads to you having no time to see to your own basic needs.<br>

This means that the mother of a newborn baby needs to be nurtured. You have gone from being an independent woman to one where you have another human being completely reliant on you for survival and the realisation that you need other people to help you so that you can nurture your baby. This is normal to feel overwhelmed by this life-changing experience. We encounter these types of changes when we become teenagers, a wife, a husband.  So with every birth, there has to be a death. Just as in Nature: Winter dies to give way to Spring. If you think about it: Winter has its own beauty, so change your expectations of how a mother is supposed to be and embrace this exciting life-changing experience.

Being in the Western world where nuclear families are prominent, it is expected that a mother with a newborn baby must just simply get on with it on her own, with her man expected to do the mothering while his partner sees to his baby’s every need. This can be difficult for a lot of men. In the newborn phase of your baby –there are definite roles for the mother and the father. The mother’s role is to nurture and meet her newborn baby’s every need. The father’s role is one of being the provider and the protector. These roles change as your baby grows. This is the beauty of life –it never stays the same, we know this and yet we continue to resist it.

The biggest challenge for a new mother is that she has to learn to ask for help and learn to receive help without feeling as though she is a failure. These are a few simple ideas on how to help the mother with her newborn baby; this applies to mothers who have other children. Through these acts of consideration, she will see that her partner respects the time she is investing in his child’s life.

Here are some ideas:

• Give her snacks and something to drink while she is feeding –day and night.
• Help her have a restful sleep between feeds.
• Do the household chores: for example, cooking, washing, and ironing clothes.
• The mother sees to the baby’s feeding and the father sees to all his baby’s other needs as a way of bonding with his newborn; such as:
• changing nappies
• bathing baby
• kangaroo baby
• rocking and singing baby to sleep.
• Do some form of mild exercise like walking in the park with a pram (increases the endorphins, less likely to have depression)
• Equally important is that partners speak with each other and learn to listen to each other. Should the partner feel unable to carry out some of these basic needs, he should arrange to have someone else to help him out: such as asking her mother or his mother to assist or hiring a domestic helper to see to the household chores. This is another way of being considerate of the mother’s needs.