What is it about?
The availability of effective instrumental support may affect the physical and mental wellness of postpartum mothers. We investigate the practices of 84 new mothers in Hong Kong mobilizing their support network to help with childcare, their experiences with infant-centric family informatics in the process, and the barriers, needs, and expectations that emerged.
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Why is it important?
We define infant-centric family informatics as a connected system of low-, medium-, and/ or high-tech tools that facilitate caregivers in a household to track and manage baby informatics together. Our findings suggest that: a) postpartum mothers may offload different types of babysitting tasks to different caregivers; they try to orchestrate the whole process through assorted communication media but may face a variety of practical and relational challenges and b) if baby-centric information could easily flow through these communication channels, new mothers would be more prepared to involve others in managing baby care.
Perspectives
As an expectant parent, I wish to involve my family members harmoniously in the baby care process. I hope this article helps family informatics researchers and service providers relate to the practical needs and relational challenges commonly faced by families with newborns, and create better informatics tools to foster mobilization of instrumental childcare support.
Man Ching Ko
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Mobilizing Instrumental Childcare Support for Postpartum Mothers: Needs for and Barriers to Infant-centric Family Informatics Practices in Hong Kong, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, November 2022, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3555084.
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