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

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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.