No wonder new mothers struggle when all they have is an app

When I had my first baby seven years ago, I didn’t have a clue what to do. I’d never changed a newborn’s nappy, didn’t know how many clothes to put on him (the first time we took him out, he wore nothing – it was hot – then we put a T-shirt on him and someone asked where the rest of his attire was) and, as for breastfeeding, I had to teach myself how to do it by reading a book.

We were living in America at the time, far from friends, family and NHS postnatal care. I remember getting into my baby’s cot to try to get him to sleep, wondering what kind of monster I was to be shouting at a helpless newborn; weeping tears of frustration a good couple of months after he was born.

It wasn’t until I had my second child, a few years later, that I realised I had probably been suffering from a mild form of postnatal depression, brought on largely by utter isolation, with no one to pass on helpful tips, take the baby from me for five minutes so I could have a shower, or just hand over a coffee and a piece of cake.

I had an extreme experience – but many women will have gone through something similar. As we live increasingly polarised lives, organising ourselves into like-minded groups based on age and stage in life, we enter new phases – like parenthood – blind, with little knowledge of what to expect.

Without older, more experienced friends and neighbours to give us sensible advice, we head online, getting ourselves into more of a muddle: a Telegraph investigation found that a number of pregnancy apps are offering all sorts of inconsistent advice on what not to consume while pregnant (camomile tea?), leading to fears that they may even be encouraging eating disorders. Small wonder that one in five of us will experience a mental health problem during pregnancy and in the first year after birth, and that NHS England has just announced it will spend £23million on maternal mental healthcare.

Having a baby is hard. You’re suddenly responsible for the well-being of another – tiny, totally helpless, utterly dependent – person. That alone is enough to put enormous pressure on anyone; throw in societal demands for new mothers to appear superhappy all the time (not helped by social media), and it’s hardly surprising that otherwise competent women are thrown into such a spiral of confusion. Even if you approach the whole business, as I did – geekily – reading everything beforehand and getting uber-organised, the reality is that things don’t always go as planned.

Cluelessness is part of the rite of new motherhood – you only learn a lot of this stuff by doing it yourself. And heading online is not always a bad thing per se. The rise of the smartphone has been a godsend to countless new mothers, offering as it does the ability to download genuinely helpful apps, and join online communities that provide support in those early, sleep-deprived weeks and months.

However, what we really need is other people – not just those going through it with us, but those who have done it before. People whose babies we can get to know before we have our own, on whom we can call when the going gets tough, who can come and make us a cup of camomile tea or show us how many layers to dress the baby in. It really does take a village – nosy neighbours and all.