New mothers turn to social media for advice on babies

Tears rolled down Angeline Anyango’s fatigued face that night in February 2017 as thoughts whizzed through her morose mind.

Her two-week-old son’s stomach was swelling and it appeared shiny, though he did not seem to be in pain. The first-time mother was shell-shocked.

“I’m a single mum; the dad is not there. It was me, my sister and my phone. I asked myself, 'What do I do?’ I started crying,” Ms Anyango recalls.

It was midnight. One option she had was to call a taxi to her residence along Nairobi’s Kikuyu Road so she could rush the baby to hospital. She also had the choice of waiting breathlessly till morning then take the infant to hospital.

There was another unconventional option she had — a WhatsApp group she belonged to. And this is what helped her.

She had joined a group with more than 200 mothers whose children were born in January 2017. Her nervous fingers typed her question. She needed ideas on how she could help her son.

Moments later, suggestions started flying in.

“Try massaging him,” one mother wrote back. “Try bicycle rides,” typed another.

Ms Olang had never heard of bicycle rides being mentioned in the same sentence as infants in her 26 years of existence. But someone explained to her.

A few moments later she was performing the procedure on her toddler and, to her surprise, the baby responded well. He passed out some stool, released some gas and he was as fit as a fiddle.

“I cleaned him and he slept peacefully till morning. If it were not for that group, maybe I would have gone to the hospital in the middle of the night, wasted and disturbed,” says Ms Anyango.

The accountant and fellow mothers are using the internet to access support groups from where they get assistance on how to tackle everyday problems.

Applications such as Facebook, WhatsApp and Telegram are fast replacing physical clubs. And users say there are many advantages of doing things online.

For instance, Kenyan mothers have a Facebook group called Pregnant and Nursing Mums Kenya that has 42,000 members and another called Pregnant and Nursing Mums Support Group that has 181,000 members.

It is from Pregnant and Nursing Mums Kenya that Ms Anyango got leads towards joining the WhatsApp group for mothers who delivered in January 2017. The group had 236 members by Thursday.

There is also a WhatsApp group for parents whose children were born before their due date (pre-term babies) that was started by Nairobi resident Ruby Kimondo. Ms Kimondo’s first, second and fourth born sons were born earlier than normal. Mothers of pre-term babies are added to the group as soon as the baby is born and are motivated by others.

“First-time parents, especially, are always very traumatising. But once they get people in the group who have gone through and overcome their present challenge, they get motivated,” says Ms Kimondo.

They encourage each other by giving advice as it is both money and time intensive to manage preterm babies.

“It is not easy to walk the journey alone. It is so traumatising and can lead to post-partum depression. When we walk together, it can be easily managed,” adds Ms Kimondo.

But as the winds of internet-based support groups sweep through the land, doctors are warning on the consequences of taking advice from peers without scrutinising it.

Dr Walter Otieno, a Kisumu-based paediatrician, has witnessed the effect of that firsthand.

One day as he was attending to children at his facility at Kisumu’s Doctors’ Plaza, a woman stormed in, wailing.

“Daktari, my son is dying, please help me,” the doctor remembers the woman screaming, frantically holding the convulsing boy.

It would later emerge that the mother had stayed for too long without taking the boy for medication because she had been advised that his was not a sickness, as such.

After she told her support group about the symptoms her son was displaying — the most visible being a whitish, watery stool — one member told her that it was because her husband had touched the kid after “touching” another woman.

Dr Otieno tells Lifestyle that the mother was convinced her child was “soiled” after the advisor in the support group told her that those were the same symptoms displayed by another a child who had been touched by a father who had had intercourse outside marriage.

She was advised to see a herbalist who would give the child a concoction to drink. She also got some substance to mix with the boy’s bathwater. It was after seeing no change after three days that the mother rushed the child to Dr Otieno’s facility.

“The child was suffering from amoeba,” says Dr Otieno, adding that he has handled several cases of women being misled in their online clubs.

“In as much as the groups can be helpful, they can be so misleading and women have to take a lot of precaution before applying the advice,” Dr Otieno advises.

Away from babies, there is a common group whose members are advised to eat all manner of things in the name of losing weight and staying attractive.

One woman was told to grind charcoal then mix with hot water and drink it as it would literally burn the fats in the stomach.  The only result was diarrhoea which hit with a vengeance.

The negatives aside, there are many encouraging developments in the available online support groups.

Lifestyle glimpsed into the working of a WhatsApp group called January 2017 Nursing Mums, created in late 2016 for mothers whose estimated date of delivery was January 2017.

Members of the group have so far held two get-togethers, the latest being last week at Utawala, Nairobi.

Group members Susan Njeri Kamau, Angeline Anyango, Esther Mburu and Sharon Mogiti shared their experiences with the group.