Motivation of the Project
The early postpartum period is a crucial time to improve health and survival of both infant and mother, yet the World Health Organization (WHO, 2008) has reported that the postpartum and postnatal period receives less attention from health-care professionals than the prenatal period and childbirth period. Even when mothers attend their obstetric checkups, the visit tends to focus on the physical aspects of care, including breastfeeding and birth control options (Fowles, Hsiu-Rong, & Milles, 2012), and emotional or coping needs are rarely met. While the Secure Attachment theory states that the first year is very important in newborn care, it states that the fourth trimester (approx. the first 100 days) are the most critical period for the baby’s adaptation to the world in physical, mental and pscyhological senses. However, the primary caregivers’, mostly mothers, postpartum physical, psychological and pedagogical equipment may not be strong enough to withstand such a critical period, and often it is not. For this reason, postpartum depression, physical pain, and the accompanying glitchy and wrong pedagogical assumptions and attitudes about infant care occur widely in this period. The only way to eliminate these problems is to raise awareness of mothers and to show how she can manage her mood and physical conditions, how she can establish a strong and healthy relationship with her baby, and how she can provide the fundamental basis for the mother-baby bond and the baby’s attachment, even if financial and technical caring support cannot be obtained. Although mothers who are financially equipped can carry out this process with different private counseling mechanisms, mothers who do not have these means compose of the larger part of the society which make this process traditional and groping for them, leading to distorted results. This situation causes the mental, psychological and even physical health of both babies and therefore the society to be weakened more fundamentally in the long run. With this project, mothers will be supported through handbook, videos by experts, and mobile application with interactive tools that they can easily access over the internet. In this way, it will be possible to eliminate the mentioned problems in postpartum period; and this support will be drawn to a more sustainable level. Thus, not only will the problem of equality of opportunity disappear, but also the problems faced by mothers in the postpartum period will be reduced to a lower level for both the baby, the mother and therefore the society.
