Does Support for Modern Moms Matter?

What do moms say? What does the data say?

In Tuesday’s post, I talked about how much help mothers get from a variety of co-resident caregivers in hunter-gatherer societies, but you might still be wondering whether this is relevant for you in the modern context. There’s no going back to our hunter-gatherer origins, even if we wanted to (and I, for one, am grateful we don’t have to watch half of our children die before reaching adulthood). That said, there is overwhelming evidence to suggest that lack of support hurts mothers in the modern context, and we don’t need to overhaul the whole system to bring some of it back. Let’s hear from some modern-day Western moms about how support or lack of support affected their postpartum experience, and see how the data lines up with all of this. 

Photo by Fin Andera from Flickr