Postpartum
15 articles
How to Maintain Intimacy After the Birth of a Child
There is a script most couples are handed about post-baby intimacy that goes "schedule a date night, drink a small wine, light a candle." This advice...
How Fathers Experience Changes After the Birth of a Child
The birth of a child reshapes a father's life just as it reshapes a mother's. Yet paternal experience is rarely discussed. Fathers experience hormonal...
What the First Month of a Newborn's Life Is Like
Nobody prepares you adequately for the first month. Not because the information doesn't exist, but because there's a category gap between reading abou...
Postpartum Adjustment: What Happens to a Mother's Mental Health
Most postpartum mental health conversations focus on depression. That focus is necessary, but it leaves a gap: the majority of new mothers don't devel...
The Role of a Partner in Supporting the Mother Emotionally
The first year after a baby arrives is one of the most physically and emotionally vulnerable periods in a woman's life. Her body is healing — perineal...
How Expectations of Motherhood Affect a Woman's Emotional State
You expected the rush of love at first sight, the deep fulfilment, the sense of having arrived where you were always meant to be. You got something me...
Maternal Emotional State in the First Weeks After Childbirth
The first weeks after birth are usually painted in two colours: blissful or brutal. The actual experience is messier — wonder and dread in the same ho...
Why Postpartum Anxiety Often Has No Obvious Cause
You're up at 3 a.m. with your sleeping baby beside you, watching them breathe, certain something is about to go wrong. Nothing is wrong. The baby is f...
How Hormonal Changes Affect Mood After Childbirth
"You should be glowing." "Hormones are no excuse." Both messages dismiss the actual physiology of the postpartum period, which is genuinely extreme. U...
Family Dynamics After the Birth of a Child
A new baby doesn't just add one person to a family. It rearranges the relationships among everyone already there. Most parents are caught off guard by...
How to Tell Fatigue From Depression
"I'm just tired" is the explanation many new parents give themselves for months. Sometimes it's accurate. Sometimes it isn't. Postpartum depression of...
How Couple Relationships Change After Childbirth
The Gottman Institute's longitudinal research has found that about two-thirds of couples report a meaningful drop in relationship satisfaction in the...
Baby Blues vs. Postpartum Depression: How to Tell the Difference
The first two weeks after birth come with weeping, wild mood swings, and a sense of being crushed by something you can't name — and most of the time,...
How Emotional Bonding Between Mother and Newborn Develops
The "magical bonding moment" at birth is one of the most damaging stories told to new mothers. About a third of women describe their first feeling tow...
Your Relationship After Having a Baby: What to Expect and What Helps
It is one of the best-kept secrets of new parenthood: most couples find their relationship harder after having a baby. The research on this is consist...