84 sources, from Cochrane reviews to psychoanalytic essays. They are not all the same kind of thing, so each one carries a small mark saying what kind of knowing it is. You are welcome to read none of it — it is here because you should be able to check.
The model underneath
Nothing here happens in isolation
Body↔Hormones↔Brain↔Psyche↔Relationships↔Family system
Pregnancy, birth and postpartum are one continuous biopsychosocial passage rather than three medical events. Which is why we try never to land on "it's just hormones" or "it's psychological" — both sentences leave out most of what is happening.
How to read the marks
Five kinds of knowing
Evidence ASystematic review, meta-analysis or guideline.Pooled findings across many studies, or a major clinical guideline.
Evidence BStrong empirical study.Longitudinal, neuroimaging or clinical research on real cohorts.
TheoryEstablished theory.A psychological or developmental theory that has shaped the field.
Clinical frameworkClinical framework or evidence translation.Practitioner synthesis — useful in the room, not a trial result.
InterpretivePsychoanalytic, anthropological or interpretive.A way of reading experience. It illuminates; it does not measure.
Filter
84 sources in the library
Pregnancy psychology & psychic transformation
Long before the baby arrives, something is being rearranged internally. These are the writers who took that seriously first.
Matrescence & identity
A word for the transition itself. Not the baby's development — yours.
Maternal brain & neuroplasticity
One of the clearest scientific stories in this app: pregnancy remodels the brain, and the remodelling looks like specialisation rather than loss.
Hormonal physiology of pregnancy & birth
No hormone produces one feeling. They work as an orchestra, in context, and the same molecule does different things depending on what else is happening.
The postpartum hormonal transition
When the placenta leaves, the steepest hormonal drop in human physiology happens over a few days. It is worth knowing about before it happens to you.
Stress physiology & the HPA axis
Pregnancy recalibrates the stress system, then recalibrates it again afterwards. Outcomes here are probabilistic — never a verdict on one hard week.
Birth physiology & a positive birth experience
What people remember about birth is rarely only the clinical route it took. It is how they were spoken to while it happened.
Continuous labour support
One of the better-evidenced things anyone can do for a labouring person is stay in the room.
Birth as a developmental passage
A conceptual thread rather than a clinical one: birth as a threshold you cross, read through anthropology and psychoanalysis as much as physiology.
Birth trauma & childbirth-related PTSD
A hard birth is not automatically a traumatic one, and a traumatic one is not automatically PTSD. Holding those apart matters — for accuracy, and for how people describe their own experience to themselves.
Attachment
The relationship starts before anyone can see it.
Parent–infant regulation
The strongest bridge in this app between biology and relationship — and the section that most consistently lowers the bar in a good way.
Perinatal depression
Never one cause. Biology, sleep, history, relationships and circumstance all get a vote.
Perinatal anxiety
Some vigilance is part of the design. The question is whether it is running your day.
Perinatal OCD & intrusive thoughts
Frightening thoughts about harm coming to the baby are common and almost always unwanted. An intrusive thought is not a wish, an intention, or psychosis.
Postpartum psychosis
Rare, sudden, and a medical emergency. This is the one section of the app that is meant to move you toward a phone, not a reflection.
Fathers, partners & non-gestational parents
Caregiving builds a parental brain in whoever does the caregiving. Gestation is one route in, not the only one.
The couple's transition to parenthood
The most reliably documented finding here is also the least discussed one before it happens: relationship satisfaction usually dips, and it is not a sign the relationship was wrong.
Coparenting
Two people can be shaky as a couple and still run a good parenting alliance — and the reverse happens too. Worth separating, because they need different repairs.
Family systems
A baby does not join a couple. It reorganises a whole system, including the generation above.
How symptoms circulate in a system
A conceptual section. Distress in a new family rarely belongs to one person alone — it moves between physiology, psyche, couple, baby, sleep and support, in loops rather than lines.
Breastfeeding & neuroendocrine regulation
Feeding is physiology and relationship at once. It is also one of many routes to a secure attachment — not a requirement for one.
Skin-to-skin & kangaroo care
One of the most robust, lowest-cost findings in newborn care.
Sleep & postpartum neuropsychology
Fragmented sleep is not a lifestyle inconvenience. It changes attention, emotion regulation and mood — and it is one of the most modifiable things in the room.
Interoception, body awareness & emotion
Background neuropsychology for why a changing body changes how you feel — used as context, not as proof about pregnancy specifically.
Predictive processing & emotion
A theoretical lens, offered as one — bodily signals plus prediction plus context, assembled into a feeling.
Autonomic regulation
For physiological claims we lean on mainstream autonomic, HPA-axis and oxytocin research, and we are explicit about where a popular framework is still contested.
Trauma
What trauma does, and what recovery actually looks like over time.
Pregnancy loss & perinatal grief
This app does not assume every pregnancy ends in a live birth, or that everyone reading arrives without a history.
Anthropology, culture & social context
There is no universal way to have a baby. Keeping that in view stops one medical culture from being mistaken for nature.
Michel Odent
Historically influential, and included selectively. Some of it anticipated later evidence; some of it remains hypothesis.
Evidence translation
Good secondary sources help us explain things. They do not stand in for the primary literature when a factual claim is on screen.
Relationships, intimacy & sexuality
Postpartum sexuality has an empirical literature. It also has a relational dimension that numbers do not reach.
Psychoanalytic perinatal perspectives
Reading motherhood as a subjective and cultural position, not only a biological one.
How we write about all this
The rules we hold ourselves to
No hormone causes a feeling on its own. We say associated with, may contribute to, or research suggests — and keep causes for the rare cases where it is earned.
Normal adaptation is not a disorder. Heightened sensitivity is not anxiety; an intrusive thought is not psychosis; ambivalence is not a lack of love; a hard birth is not PTSD.
We try not to pathologise ordinary pregnancy and postpartum change, and not to romanticise it either. Contradictory things can be true in the same hour.
Non-gestational parents form deep attachment and undergo their own neurological and psychological adaptation through caregiving.
Breastfeeding is not required for bonding. Responsive care, in whatever form, is what the attachment literature points to.
Where the research is mixed, we say so, and we keep empirical findings visibly separate from the frameworks we find useful.
Educational, and not a substitute for medical care. Guidelines change; your clinician knows your situation and this app does not. The older working bibliography still lives at references.