“There is no support network.” A woman says this in a focus group of the Colunga Childhood Observatory. And a second later, another woman in the same session repeats it almost verbatim: “The same thing happens to me. We are who we are. There is no support network.” They are not talking about a bad week. They are talking about the permanent texture of raising children today in Chile: sustaining the care of a young daughter or son almost alone, with no one else to share the burden.
That phrase –“there is no support network”– is repeated, in different words, in the four focus group sessions that the Colunga Childhood Observatory conducted in January 2026, as part of the fieldwork to build the agenda“Early Childhood: Well-being, gaps, and proposals to strengthen public policy in Chile”. The report they just released –available for free download on their –, is the most up-to-date snapshot of how girls and boys aged 0 to 5 live today in Chile.
In those groups, 37 caregivers participated –33 women and 4 men–, in an open call to anyone who perceived themselves as the primary caregiver of a child of that age, regardless of family ties: most were mothers, but there were also fathers –one of whom shared care every other week with his ex-partner–, older sisters and brothers who took on caregiving because, as they explained, they had more available time than the adults who had to go to work, and women from very different backgrounds: from professionals who decided to stop working to dedicate themselves to care, to women who had not finished high school.
Of those four men, none coincided with another: in each of the four focus groups, only one participated. The moderator of the sessions herself pointed this out as a finding in itself: “We have held 4 meetings and in all there is always only one man. It still somehow represents how caregiving tasks are distributed.”
That phrase from the moderator –how caregiving tasks are distributed– was the thread that ran through the four sessions. One woman explained it with almost brutal clarity: “I was going to appeal to support networks, but I feel that nowadays the possibility of counting on parents or relatives is increasingly less, because they are all working.” Another participant, alone with her children, summed it up like this: “I have no support network: it’s me, me, and me. I try to do the best I can, but society judges you quite a lot.”
What was reflected in the focus groups through the testimonies, and what the portrays through the reading of available public data, is not a problem exclusive to women in situations of greater vulnerability. A nutritionist who participated in one of the groups described it from her own professional decision: “I recently quit my job for the same reason, because I don’t have a support network that can help me care for my baby.” The analysis agenda confirms that this is not anecdotal: 9% of caregivers in Chile face parenting with high levels of stress, and an additional 26% with moderate levels, figures that are largely explained by the lack of family, community, or institutional support for raising children.
When that network is not there, the body finds its own escape valves. “I lock myself in the bathroom: ‘Please, 15 minutes for me.’ And then I come out as if nothing happened,” said another woman who was part of the group interviews. Another, who spends the whole day alone with her three children while her partner works late, described it like this: “I get up around nine, when my partner leaves for work, and he gets home around midnight. So I am alone all day.”
For Paloma Del Villar, director of the Colunga Childhood Observatory, this loneliness is not a coincidence but design: “Care in Chile has a woman’s face – mothers and grandmothers bear almost all the burden – and that architecture works without a network: there are more than 50,000 households with no support for raising children,” she states. And she warns that even the network many families take for granted is more fragile than it seems: “Grandmothers care for children in 27% of households with girls and boys aged 0 to 5 years. This is beautiful on one hand, but it is also a warning sign, because it shows how fragile our care system is: if that grandmother gets sick, ages, or simply is not there, there is no plan B.”
“In a birth, two are always born: a baby is born, but also a mother is born,” says Valentina Peri, psychologist and executive director of La Casa del Encuentro, who accompanied the focus groups as part of the Expert Panel that the Colunga Childhood Observatory asked to supervise the progress of the research that resulted in the . “It is expected that in that transformation ambivalence, sadness, even a feeling of not recognizing oneself will appear. The problem is not that all that appears: the problem is having to go through it alone.” Therefore, she argues, the mental health of a woman in the postpartum period cannot depend on the luck she has of having a mother, sister, godmother, or available friend. “If we know that networks are a protective factor, building care networks must also be a social responsibility. The care crisis and the mental health crisis go hand in hand.”
This loneliness has a correlate in the mental health data collected by the analysis agenda. The public system measures depressive symptoms in women with the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale, routinely applied during pregnancy and the puerperium. And the pattern is eloquent: during pregnancy, the percentage of women with depressive symptoms remains relatively stable, between 12% and 15%. In the postpartum period, however, it rises steadily as the months pass, reaching nearly 20% six months after birth, the highest point of the entire curve.
That is: for one in five women, motherhood does not become lighter as the months go by. It becomes heavier, precisely in the period when one is supposed to “already be used to it,” as one of the women who participated in the conversation groups explains.
Why exactly at six months? It is no coincidence: it is also the moment when the postpartum leave ends in Chile. Until then, many women sustain care relying on whatever they have at hand – a mother, a godmother, a sister – although that network often does not exist or is insufficient. At six months, another support also begins to fail: they have to figure out who will take care of the baby to return to work, just when the public system, as the agenda shows, responds less: while pregnant women with depressive symptoms are referred to mental health in about 87% to 91% of cases, that referral drops to less than half at the six-month postpartum check-up: between 34% and 58%, depending on the year. The system detects more after birth. But it refers less. Just when the family network also begins to break down.
Read more The unprecedented measure that Mamdani is promoting in New York to give «time off» to parents
This pattern –detecting without responding– is not exclusive to postpartum mental health. Paloma Del Villar, director of the Colunga Childhood Observatory, states this: “One of the findings we discovered by analyzing public data in Chile is that the health system detects these problems: it detects, for example, that the family is in poverty, detects that there is domestic violence, detects that this can be a risk for the child’s development, but still, there is no response,” she explains.
A midwife who worked for several years in primary care and who participated in her role as a caregiver in one of the focus groups gave a clue as to why this happens in the public system: what a midwife provides in this type of check-up, she commented, is accompaniment and clinical follow-up, not a therapeutic session per se. “In the public system, they really provide a very good service, but very limited, because they give you 20 minutes, 40 minutes. So you have the responsibility to quickly screen if the pregnant woman is depressed, give her a mini counseling. In fact, I worked in Primary Health Care and quit because I kept asking myself: what can I do in 20 minutes?”
Two women, in two different focus groups, opened up about how they experienced postpartum depression. “I had it and didn’t treat it afterward because continuing was too expensive; that issue stayed with me,” says one mother. Another, in a different group, described something similar, with an additional layer of fragility: “I was diagnosed with depression before getting pregnant, and during pregnancy I also saw a psychologist; afterward too, because postpartum depression tends to develop. Fortunately, I could get free care through GES, but now I quit and now I am left adrift again. I am stable, I am fine, but what happens if tomorrow I keep caring and I decompensate? Where will that support be?”
There is also a relevant fact recorded about how childbirth is attended today: in 2024, 46% of births in the public system were by cesarean – elective and emergency – more than triple what the World Health Organization recommends. It is a finding different from mental health – there is no cause-and-effect relationship between the two – but one of the women summed it up with a phrase that connects with the same question that runs through this entire article: “A cesarean is not a minor surgery, they cut through seven layers and ask you to be up the next day caring for a baby. And who takes care of you? No one.”
The Early Childhood report from the Colunga Childhood Observatory emphatically underlines that untreated maternal depression is not only a woman’s health problem; it is also a determinant of her daughter’s or son’s development. It affects the quality of the bond, breastfeeding, stimulation at home, and the ability to read the baby’s signals, precisely the mechanisms that, according to the cited evidence, shape cognitive and socioemotional development in the early years of life.
The women in the focus groups described it without using that technical language, but pointing exactly there. One of them, reflecting on how unprepared she was for her own pregnancy, describes motherhood as something “very romanticized”: “Maybe people who just find out they are pregnant could attend a talk explaining a bit about what they will face, what postpartum will be like, what they will feel, what they won’t feel. Because in the end I wanted that child, but at the same time I was very scared.” While sharing her experience, she shared something that well summarizes the gap between expectation and real experience: “So when the baby is born, it’s not like you will love them immediately. Some women do, others don’t.”
Those reflections came along with others where the women confessed difficult passages of how they experienced the birth of their children. “I hadn’t realized how bad I was until (within the framework of a community accompaniment program available every day) I started talking to the psychologist and started kind of looking at myself in a mirror,” one of them said. “At the CESFAM you see the psychologist maybe once a month if you get an appointment; in that program it was constant.”
Psychologist Valentina Peri, director of La Casa del Encuentro, warns that the image we usually have of postpartum depression is too extreme – a woman who can’t get up, who can’t care for her baby – when in reality many women do everything they have to do: they feed, take to check-ups, comply. They just do it deeply sad, disconnected, almost on autopilot, and that anguish often appears as irritability, extreme fatigue, or headaches, more than as the picture one imagines. “When mothers are in survival mode, solving, trying to get through the day with a heavy load, often there isn’t even space to ask how they are,” she explains. “Many women, when their children are a bit older, can look back and say ‘I think I was depressed,’ but at that moment they couldn’t see it because they were too busy trying to hold everything together. That’s why the presence of another is key: someone who looks at the caregiver and says ‘what you are going through is hard, you are doing a great job, how are you?’ Because when that other person doesn’t exist, it is very difficult even to take note of one’s own discomfort.”
On that same gap between what exists and what is needed, another participant from the same group summed it up like this: “I’m going to the psychologist at the clinic, and it’s one session a month, and one session a month is not enough.” “You are a mom, but really you are a person, and you also have other things to address besides being a mom,” she added. “They only take care of the children’s health, so where do we fit in? We need to be well to be well for them.”
The research data itself quantifies that chain, from stress to bonding: a caregiver with high stress in parenting is 14 points more likely not to engage in any stimulation activity with their child during the week. Today, 27% of families with girls and boys aged 0 to 5 – about 97,000 children – do not do a single activity of this type during the week: no story, no song, no play. “The everyday bond – playing with children, reading them a story, going for walks together – doesn’t cost money and is the raw material with which healthy, capable, and resilient people are built,” says Del Villar. “But there is a group for whom this is not happening, and that is where we have to focus.”
Read more Pope Leo XIV calls to prevent AI from being «another vehicle of ideological or economic colonialism»
