How prepared a new mother feels to care for her newborn in the first three days after birth may be far more than a subjective impression — it may be a clinically meaningful signal of postpartum psychological vulnerability. Understanding what drives that readiness, and what erodes it, has real implications for hospital discharge timing, rooming-in care protocols, and early postpartum mental health screening.
This cross-sectional study enrolled 200 women at 48–72 hours postpartum in a rooming-in setting, using three self-rated 0–10 readiness scales — for daytime care, nighttime care, and breastfeeding — alongside validated psychometric instruments, pain scores, anxiety measures, and hematological data. The most striking finding was the outsized influence of breastfeeding readiness on overall caregiving confidence: the odds ratio for its linear association with both daytime and nighttime care readiness approached 13, with a partially non-linear gradient suggesting threshold effects at both ends of the confidence spectrum. Elevated anxiety on day two was independently associated with reduced readiness across all three domains, with odds ratios ranging from 0.61 to 0.73. Sleep disturbance consistently suppressed readiness, while the capacity to maintain goal-directed behavior despite low mood was protective for daytime care. Nighttime readiness showed a particular sensitivity to concentration under emotional strain, and was markedly lower among the small subset of women reporting suicidal ideation (OR = 0.24).
The breastfeeding-caregiving confidence link is biologically and psychologically plausible: early lactation success reinforces maternal self-efficacy, a construct well established in parenting literature as predictive of downstream child outcomes. What makes this study analytically useful is its use of stepwise ordinal regression with bootstrap sensitivity analyses, lending some robustness to a cross-sectional design that cannot establish causality. The sample of 200, drawn from a single institutional setting, limits generalizability across birth contexts and cultural backgrounds. Still, the finding that anxiety at 48 hours — not pain, hemoglobin, or obstetric complexity — is the dominant modifiable predictor of readiness is an incrementally important contribution, reinforcing the case for routine psychological screening before hospital discharge rather than relying on physical recovery metrics alone.
