Sun 14 July 2019:
Despite the endless love and joy, being new parents is extremely difficult and can be overwhelming when a newborn needs all the time and attention parents can give. In these life-challenging circumstances, they forget about self-care, sleep, food and social life. Fathers are now taking up more childcare chores, so that the emotional and physical burden of such extreme life change is shared rather than falling only on the mother’s shoulders. And even if both parents try to support each other by dividing their responsibilities equally, some things, like giving birth and breastfeeding, are assigned by nature. But it’s 2019, and new technologies are ready to challenge this theory.
Japanese company Dentsu presented a device that promises to change the future of nursing for fathers who want to share all the childcare tasks and form a special bond with the child from an early age. “Father’s Nursing Assistant” debuted in Austin, Texas at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival earlier this month and it allows men to breastfeed children.
An intriguing device is basically a wearable milk tank in the shape of a woman’s breasts. One of the breasts contains milk or formula and the other – a breastfeeding system with a silicone nipple, enabling a father-infant contact similar to one that child has with its mother. Father’s Nursing Assistant is heated and vibrates to induce sleep and has sensors that track child’s breastfeeding and sleeping behavior and transmit the data to an app on your smartphone.
Dentsu is a cross-functional organization whose mission is to utilize a variety of methods, technologies and experiences to change the feelings and behaviors of people living in the digital age. With Father’s Nursing Assistant, which was developed with the help of pediatricians and babysitters, the company wants to encourage fathers to take an active part in stressful childrearing usually reserved for mothers and increase the amount of sleep infants get.
“The amount of time infants in Japan spend sleeping is shorter compared to the rest of the world. Much of the parental stress and difficulties surrounding childrearing are related to feeding and sleeping, and generally the rate of participation by fathers tends to be low. Breastfeeding is also effective at helping the parent sleep-a benefit that is currently skewed toward women. Focusing on breastfeeding, we aim to decrease the amount of burden on mothers and increase the amount of time infants sleep by enabling fathers to breastfeed,” – Dentsu states in a press release.
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