“I Haven’t Had Anyone Talk to Me About Phone Use, At All”: Primiparous Mothers’ Conversations About Smartphone Use While Caregiving

TL;DR

New mothers in New Zealand rarely discuss smartphone use with healthcare providers, missing a chance to support healthy parent-infant relationships.

Contribution

Highlights the lack of guidance on smartphone use for new mothers and its potential impact on infant attachment.

Findings

Primiparous mothers reported minimal discussions about smartphone use with perinatal professionals.

Silence from healthcare providers was the most common response regarding smartphone habits.

The study suggests this silence represents a missed opportunity for supporting new mothers.

Abstract

Our smartphone habits have implications for our mental health, including new mothers’ experience of loneliness. For a baby, whose developmental trajectory will be directly impacted by their attachment relationship, a parent’s unconscious smartphone use is likely to be of lifelong consequence given the impact of such use on attachment. Therefore, new parents would benefit from support in assessing their smartphone habits and the impact on their relationships with their infants. This raises the question—are they receiving any such advice or guidance from perinatal health professionals? This study describes findings from semi-structured interviews and subsequent reflexive thematic analysis with primiparous women in Aotearoa|New Zealand. We found that the women in this sample had had very few discussions about their smartphone use initiated by the perinatal workforce. In fact, the most common form of communication on the matter was silence. We suggest this silence indicates a missed opportunity in offering additional support for new mothers to modify their pre-partum smartphone habits, in service of the parent–infant relationship.