Expert launch app to help lactating mothers

By Christine Onwuachumba

Motherhood is consuming. It comes with an incredible amount of stress. Balancing being a mother, a partner, and yourself seems impossible at times.

As a mother, you love your child, but also miss the person you were before motherhood. It gets worse because mothers don’t dare to say this out loud to others for fear of judgment.

But according to experts, many mothers crack under the pressure of breastfeeding their babies, while running a busy career life, and also taking care of their homes.

In a recent commentary in the journal ‘Nursing for Women’s Health, a lot of mothers go through psychological pressure to exclusively breastfeed their babies.

And these pressures contribute to postpartum depression symptoms in new mothers who are unable to achieve their breastfeeding intentions because of one reason or the other.

“Mothers feel like society doesn’t support them overall, especially during the infant feeding periods,” said Dr. Marilyn Uba, a gynecologist at the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LUTH).

“Mothers are told they must do everything possible to succeed at breastfeeding, but that’s extremely difficult in a society where many parents must go back to work when their infants are mere weeks old,” she said.

It was to solve this problem for lactating mothers, that spurred the creation of the BabyRoo app.

The BabyRoo application is the brainchild of Titilayo Medonuye, is a certified lactation consultant.

It is an app designed to ease the heavy pressures on breastfeeding mothers, especially the busy ones.

According to Medonuye, the BabyRoo app is not just a babysitting software that helps mothers to keep tabs and monitor their toddlers. It also removes the rigours of going for doctor appointments, by keeping records of baby’s health which the paediatrician can easily log online to see, make prescriptions, and send back to mothers.

“For mothers, especially career ones who still engaged in breastfeeding, and placed their little ones in charge of a caregiver, BabyRoo is the answer to mother’s intermittent queries on their baby while at work.

“Questions like, ‘has the baby eaten?’ ‘Is the baby sleeping?’ ‘Have you given the drugs to the baby?’ Or asking the questions from the paediatrician such as ‘When did the baby start stooling?’ ‘How many times has she vomited?’ amongst others are answered with the Babyroo application.

“I created the BabyRoo app when I thought of how I can help more mothers with breastfeeding challenges. I have a lot of them calling me but I can’t talk to everyone at the same time. I sought to find how I can utilize technology to make it easier for my clients”.

For Medonuye the challenges when developing the BabyRoo app are still her biggest motivations. “Power, getting a location for manufacturing, and getting NAFDAC approval are some of the issues I faced while building the app.

” However, we just have to keep pushing. A lot of myth on breastfeeding is an issue. We had to break them down. For instance, saying if you do not breastfeed your child in a day is an issue. We must break those ideologies first before we can start teaching them on the best way to break feed,” she said.