Online survey to look at motherhood in the 21st century

The online survey aims to improve the provision of services to women bringing up children. Photo / Getty Images

New Zealand will be the first country targeted in an international survey that aims to provide insights into the reality of motherhood in the 21st century.

An anonymous internet questionnaire will go online at midday on Sunday, Mother's Day, and remain open for several months.

It will ask mothers to talk about their thoughts and feelings on their role.

A similar questionnaire will go live two hours later in Australia and parallel studies will run in the United States and Britain later this year.

The women behind the project, New Zealand author Jodie Hedley-Ward and Australian clinical psychologist Dr Angela Huntsman, are both mothers.

They say the survey has the potential to improve the provision of services to women bringing up children.

The results would be analysed to provide information relevant to policy makers and health practitioners.

Ms Hedley-Ward, 32, believed the education, employment and travel opportunities open to women today had resulted in different expectations about motherhood.

The survey follows a parenting advice book she released last year entitled You Sexy Mother.

She said she was swamped by feedback from readers.

"The response was phenomenal," she said.

"In one day, we had up to 1600 emails come through to me, just from mums wanting more from their motherhood experience than they are experiencing."

In the book, she talks about the need to have a strong support network and to maintain interests and passions to help women through the ups and downs of motherhood.

Raised in Dunedin and now living on Queensland's Sunshine Coast, Ms Hedley-Ward said figures showing that one in seven women experienced post-natal depression were "pretty staggering".

"It's a lot of factors, but it's a huge transition into motherhood," she said.

"You get a sense of losing your freedom, losing your career and losing the self-esteem that came with that prior to motherhood."

Ms Hedley-Ward, a former marketing executive who has two pre-school children, said the survey would be large scale, with about 130 questions.

She hoped to get responses from at least 5000 mothers in New Zealand and more than 10,000 in Australia, with much higher numbers expected in the United States and Britain.

"The results will be valuable to anybody who provides a service or product to mothers," she said.

"It will change the way our mothers are marketed and how we are represented in the media."

The survey questionnaire will be available at motherhoodstudy.net.

- NZPA