How to Handle Postpartum Visitors: Boundaries, Support & Saying No

Welcome back to the Postpartum Prep Podcast. My name is Ceridwen, I'm your podcast host and your guide to preparing for life after birth. Today we're doing our weekly bonus episode where I answer three of your real questions here on the podcast.

Today's topic, we're talking about how to plan for postpartum visitors and help after birth. I'm going to jump right into the first question. How do you politely say no to visitors? This person says, I have a lot of family that I know will want to come see us in the hospital, but I'm not sure I want that.

And I totally relate. This was completely me. And actually now after having gone through that experience, I would say even more if you don't want visitors while you're in the hospital.

I'm all for that, mainly because your sleep will already be so disrupted between the baby and the nurses and the doctors coming in to check on you. You don't need to add visitors into that sleep disturbance as well. So one option for politely saying no to visitors would just be sending them a text a few weeks before your due date.

Anyone that you think might potentially be trying to come and visit you in the hospital. You just send them a text a few weeks before your due date to say, hey, we're excited to introduce you to baby, but I just want to let you know we're planning not to have visitors in the hospital, but we'll make sure to invite you once we're feeling more settled in back home. Something just brief, easy like that.

One thing that I also find can be helpful so that people know it's not just them. It seems a little bit more like this is just a blanket announcement you're putting out. It's a little less personal is creating like an image that says this.

So then you can send this image and it just feels slightly less personal. So people might take it less personally. If you listen to our last episode about the top three postpartum prep pitfalls, I mentioned about using templates for also discussing boundaries with visitors and ways that visitors can help.

And I actually have those templates already made for you inside of my postpartum prep pitfalls guide, which is completely free. The templates are all completely free as well. So I'll link that in the show notes.

And in general, make sure to listen to the last podcast episode if you do have any more questions about boundaries with visitors because I do talk about it in the last episode. But coming back to this, how do you politely say no to visitors and my idea of sending them a text beforehand, I do want to say I think you know your family best. Use your judgment in whether you feel like this approach is the right approach for you.

But just in general, I do want to say personally, I found motherhood has just been having to get more comfortable in general with setting boundaries because it's part of taking care of your baby. And often it's part of taking care of yourself, which is part of taking care of your baby as well. Taking care of yourself is part of taking care of your baby.

And boundaries can be a really important part of all of that. And this is kind of maybe your initiation into practicing holding and setting boundaries. I also don't think you should have to be doing that alone.

Definitely, especially after birth, you should not be the one trying to have to navigate saying no to visitors. See if you have a partner or a friend or anyone else in your life who can help you with that. Another idea would even be having a dedicated person who you send everyone who wants to know if they can come visit.

You send them to, you say, Hey, so and so is arranging my visitors for me. Send them to that person and that person can be the protector of your postpartum bubble. I think this leads us right into the next question, which is my mother-in-law is coming to stay with us for a month to help with baby.

My mom will also be 20 minutes away, so I know she'll be over a lot. I'm nervous that they'll both be a little overbearing and I'm not super confident in myself with setting boundaries. For example, I know my mother-in-law will probably be coming into our room every time she hears the baby cry to help.

She did this to my sister-in-law and was constantly taking the baby even when my sister-in-law didn't ask for help. She means well, but I think it will be too much for me and I'll end up snapping at some point. I'm sure a lot of people listening to this will also relate to this concern.

I have a couple of suggestions here. One would be getting really clear on what you do want. You said that your mother-in-law is coming to help with baby.

What does help with baby mean to you? You know it doesn't mean coming into your room every time the baby cries to help, but what does helping with the baby look like to you? What do you think would feel good to you? Maybe it looks like holding baby while you take a shower or have some time to yourself or take a nap. Maybe it looks like incorporating her into a shift sleeping schedule during the night so she has time with baby at a predictable time each day. She knows she's going to have that time.

And it also means while she's on shift, it means you get to have a stretch of sleep. So this looks like a couple hours where she would have that dedicated time to take care of your baby and you would have that dedicated time to sleep. So maybe it's a couple hours in the first half of the night from like 7 or 8 or maybe it's early morning from like 6am onwards.

Or maybe none of that is right for you, but really I would just encourage you to reflect on, like I said before, what does helping with baby really mean to you and what kind of help with baby do you see yourself feeling comfortable with? And can you talk that through with your mother-in-law before she comes to visit so you both have those shared expectations? I'd also say maybe she's not just there to help with the baby, she could also be there to help you. And I wonder would she be interested in helping with things other than just the baby like cooking or running errands or even things like helping to load the dishwasher each day? Those little things can actually really add up. And one thing I'd say is if she's visiting you, how can you empower her to help with those kinds of things? If she's visiting you, I wonder is there anything that she might need to actually feel more comfortable in stepping up to take, you know, sometimes you just, you feel awkward cooking in someone else's kitchen if you don't know that actually they're more than happy for you to help.

Or I would also encourage you to think through some of those daily things that you do have to do around the house like loading the dishwashers, putting a load of laundry on. And can this be part of your postpartum planning process is actually going through this list and seeing in advance who in your house, whether that's your mother-in-law or whether it's your partner or whether it's someone else entirely, who can you delegate these things to? And just opening up that conversation before birth. So again, we're just trying to create more shared expectations for what that period of time after birth might look like.

The other thing I'll say on this is checking in with your husband because are you guys on the same page about what your boundaries are? Is your husband also on the same page with you about what your mother-in-law helping with the baby looks like? Or does your husband have a completely different idea? Is your husband expecting your mother-in-law will be coming in every single time she hears the baby cries? What I'm trying to get at here is will your husband be able to be part of that advocating for your boundaries? And especially some couples definitely find things go a lot smoother if the husband is the one to communicate those boundaries to the mother-in-law because it's his mom. And if he's going to be the one responsible for communicating the boundaries, you guys need to make sure you're on the same page. The other thing I would say though is sometimes it is easier coming from you.

Not necessarily easier, but just to keep that flow in communication open between you and your mother-in-law. So don't take this as me saying your husband should be the only one to talk to his mother about these things. Maybe this is more just something for you guys to think about together as a team.

You could even reflect on previous situations if there have been any other times with your mother-in-law where you had felt frustrated. How did you and your husband deal with that situation then? And you can reflect on whether there's anything you can learn from that situation that you did find helpful then or that you might actually want to change in the way you handle situations with your mother-in-law moving forward. And now for our last question.

How soon after birth should I allow visitors at home postpartum? And this is so dependent on your situation. A couple things that you might want to think about. First is health and safety.

Often people want to limit the number of visitors that come in the early days just to limit the number of germs that your baby is exposed to. That being said, even with people who do come into your home, you can definitely have health and safety practices in place like hand sanitizer by the door. You can even ask them, you know, especially since the pandemic, many people are a lot more open to wearing masks.

So if you want people to wear masks, that's definitely your choice. If you're having people enter your home, you can definitely ask and even provide them yourself rather than expecting them to bring any. But other things that you might think about when it comes to how soon after birth should you allow visitors into your home.

The biggest thing for me is always support. What level of support do you need and how many people do you need and how soon are you going to need them? And then the most important thing I would say when it comes to how soon after birth you should be allowing visitors at home, the most important thing in my opinion is considering your emotional well-being. Especially in those first few weeks, it's really common to feel quite emotional.

And even if you're not feeling emotional, you're still recovering from birth. You're in a really tender place. You're also just spending that time with your new baby, right? And when it comes to visitors after birth, I would say the sooner that you're having visitors, the more cautious you want to be about who you're bringing in.

I'm more concerned, I'm less concerned about how soon you're bringing people in and I'm more concerned about who the people are that you're bringing in and how attuned they're going to be to your emotional well-being. How respectful they're going to be of your boundaries. Are they going to be there strictly as visitors where you're going to feel like you need to wait on them or are they there as helpers where they're actually there to support you? The last thing I would say on this is that your sleep is going to be the top priority in those first few weeks.

And anytime visitors are coming, I said this right at the beginning, but anytime visitors are coming around, that's time that you're not spending sleeping unless they're there explicitly to help you take a nap or something like that. That's support that's different from just having a visitor come. So considering sleep is another thing, but also considering your social well-being as well, this is going to completely depend on your personality, how much social interaction you like.

But if you know you're super social and you love having people around and you are so excited to introduce your baby to everyone you know, then forget everything I just said and focus on what's going to really make you happy. But I do just know a lot of families prefer that quieter start to life after baby. And they do prefer to have a little bit of a buffer between giving birth and when you actually start inviting lots of people in.

Usually it's those first two weeks, but some people will protect that space even up to six weeks. But again, just remembering not to completely isolate yourself, but perhaps just being a lot more discerning with who you do actually invite into your space and why they're there and what your boundaries are. And I talk more about visitors in my postpartum prep pitfalls guide, and I include some templates there to help you with talking about those boundaries and talking about your expectations for when visitors come.

So if you want to dive deeper into that and start making some of those really practical preparations for handling visitors, you can download my free guide. I'll link it in the show notes. And that brings us to the end of the episode.

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