Best known for the baby bottles found in nurseries around the world, Philips Avent brings in Gina Rodriguez to help launch the Share the Care Connector, a new, free tool built to help mothers turn the people who love them into an actual, working village. Rodriguez tells us why this matters.
She joined the campaign to support the launch of a feature that, she believes, will change how the world sees maternal support.
As Rodriguez sat down in her home, going through family memories with me– sharing her experience through not just one, but two pregnancies and postpartum journeys, her 9-month-old daughter briefly cried in the other room. Yet she did not need to stop or delay our interview, because there was someone in her village tending to that baby so that she could have time for herself!
In many ways, this was a firsthand, close-up look at the demands of motherhood and why it truly takes a village to raise a child.
She urges mothers to seek support because, according to her, ‘no one human should raise children alone’
During our discussion, she opens up about her journey, disclosing that she wasn’t always open to support; there were times after her first pregnancy when she did not seek help and wished that she had it.
She and many other first-time mothers often overwork themself. In a study published in Biological Research for Nursing in 2004, 41 first-time mothers tracked their Fitbit devices for a year before and after birth, and found that average daily sleep dropped to 4.4 hours in the first week after birth from 7.8 hours before pregnancy, with their longest stretch of uninterrupted sleep falling to just 2.2 hours.
Rodriguez tells mothers who feel guilty or uncomfortable asking for help, “You can not do it all”, reassuring them that the Share the Care Connector will “give you space to be the mom that you want to be”.
For her, support looks like getting the household responsibilities taken care of and being able to take a break or tend to her individual needs with confidence that the work is getting done.
She explains that this app will do just that through a free messaging tool– allowing mothers to access help in ways they never could before.
There’s a subliminal onus placed on mothers to rally their troops and find the help they need. She wants to debunk that “unfair” expectation, because according to her, mothers already have so much to handle, physically and emotionally.
Her message to those moms is, “You do not have to be deserving of help. You are already deserving of help. You don’t have to do anything to deserve sleep. You are enough”.
Rodriguez shared her postpartum journey with her now 3- year-old son and how demanding and vastly different this was from her current experience with her 9-month-old daughter.
“My boy was in the NICU. He lost oxygen in the canal, and he had to do cold therapy, which was essentially [when] they brought his body temperature below 98.6 degrees. It’s a cold therapy to like stop inflammation, and so I couldn’t hold him for the first three days of his life”.
Traumatized from this experience, she told herself, “I’m never letting you go”.
She added, “I didn’t know how to let him go, and I did everything with him all the time”.
Rodriguez told me one day she had to reckon with the physical and psychological consequences of “doing it all”.
She referenced relating to Emmy Rossum’s popular interview on the Call Her Daddy podcast, where Rossum tells audiences that through trying to take motherhood on alone, she also learned, “sometimes it’s okay to do a little bit less”.
Adding, “By the time my daughter came, I was like, if I don’t have help, I’m going to fall apart”.
Now, with her 9-month-old daughter, she can be attentive and present in her daughter’s life, while also receiving the support she needs.
Rodriguez recognizes the values that Share the Care Connector offers by organizing maternal care networks and fostering conversations like these.
Our conversation was her first public discussion about what maternal support looks like to a mother and from a loved one. For her, it is “refreshing” to discuss her children and journey through motherhood so candidly. It’s also equally important to debunk the myth that moms need to be able to do everything.
She’s gotten firsthand experience seeing how this tool is normalizing and reshaping narratives around maternal needs.
Philips Avent’s Share the Care Connector will launch on August 5.
