Mobilizing Instrumental Childcare Support for Postpartum Mothers: Needs for and Barriers to Infant-centric Family Informatics Practices in Hong Kong

Abstract

The availability of effective instrumental support may affect the physical and mental wellness of postpartum mothers. Through an online survey with 84 new mothers in Hong Kong and six-month follow-up interviews with one family, we investigate the practices of our participants 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. Our findings suggest that 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. New mothers demand affordable, usable, and accessible information and communication supports to streamline infant-centric family informatics, if applicable. We thus propose a set of design considerations as to how a (connected) system of low-, medium-, and/or high-tech informatics tools could better foster mobilization of instrumental childcare support.