Enhancing Women’s Wellbeing During Matrescence, Motherhood, and Perinatal Transitions

By Dr Hannah Slootjes

With immense pride and a deep, steady breath, I’m honoured to introduce Enhancing Women’s Wellbeing During Matrescence, Motherhood, and Perinatal Transitions: An Evidence-Based Guide for Occupational Therapists. This book offers a collection of chapters as part of a growing global movement – a collective call to action for occupational therapists, health professionals, educators, and systems to better understand, support, and advocate for women’s health across the lifespan.

Occupational therapists have been working in women’s and maternal health since the 1980s, and the past decade has seen a significant rise in diverse evidence-based, person-centred practices tailored to women’s unique health journeys. We bring those threads together in this book, reflecting the collective wisdom of clinicians, researchers, educators, and women with lived experience who have been quietly building this field, listening deeply to women, responding with compassion and rigour, and working toward meaningful, sustainable change.

Why this book, and why now?

We often say, ‘it takes a village to raise a child’, yet in reality the village simply isn’t always there. Instead, motherhood can be accompanied by gradual, cumulative losses: of rest, sleep, freedom, identity, connection, choice, income, autonomy, and wellbeing. Behind closed doors, many of us whisper, ‘no one prepared me for this’, or joke that we ‘need wine to survive’.

When women seek healthcare support, many dreading a postnatal depression diagnosis, they are often met with well-meaning but dismissive reassurances that ‘it’s just part of being a mum’, ‘at least the baby’s healthy’, and ‘enjoy these precious moments while you can’. These responses often silence more than they soothe. They reflect a broader system that overlooks the complexity of women’s needs, especially during times of transition and transformation.

We talk about the glass ceiling and sticky floors, but rarely about the maternal wall – the systemic, cultural, and embodied barriers that impact women’s participation, wellbeing, freedom, agency, and autonomy in the context motherhood.

This book addresses those barriers, offering occupational therapy frameworks for recognising and dismantling them to better respond to women’s needs.

A unifying framework for the profession

This book was reflexively developed from my PhD research and clinical practice, but it is not mine alone. It is a deeply collaborative project offering a shared platform that unites the voices of more than 60 contributors from Australia, Brazil, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and USA. Together, we provide evidence-informed, occupation-centred strategies to advance women’s and girls’ wellbeing from prevention, early intervention, treatment, habilitation, rehabilitation and restorative frameworks.

Topics include the occupational nature of menstruation, pelvic health, birth trauma, perinatal transitions, mental health, neurodivergence, menopause, mothering with disability, and more. Each chapter considers how occupational therapy can proactively respond to challenges and strengths across life stages, and across systems.

Occupational therapists have long supported mothers through parenting programs, early childhood centres, hospital units, pelvic health clinics, or disability supports. This book raises awareness of these roles, providing the scaffolding to connect those efforts and build a unifying framework for the profession, and offering a conversation starter for collaborative reform.

Matrescence, co-occupation, and feminism: Reframing how we work

We’ve designed this book to be a clinical resource and contribution to the advancement of occupational science. By positioning matrescence as a core theoretical and practice-based lens, the work draws deeply from anthropological roots and feminist traditions, inviting occupational therapists to engage more critically with the sociocultural forces that shape health and wellbeing.

Matrescence, coined by anthropologist Dana Raphael, offers a language and framework that bridges individual experience with collective context. It allows us to examine how cultural scripts, gendered expectations, and structural inequalities shape women’s occupational lives, and how these dynamics are embodied across transitions like menstruation, motherhood, menopause, and end-of-life.

Feminist scholarship adds depth by illuminating the often-invisible emotional, existential, and unpaid labour of women’s lives, and reminding us of fundamental human needs. Occupational therapy, grounded in the doing, being, becoming, and belonging of human experience, is uniquely positioned to synthesise these insights into responsive, relational, and holistic care.

A foundational concept in understanding the occupational nature matrescence is co-occupation, the shared, reciprocal engagement between mother and infant. Feeding, soothing, resting, and bonding are not simply tasks done to a child, they are deeply relational experiences that shape connection, regulation, and wellbeing for mother-infant dyads as a couple. While mainstream systems tend to separate mother and child care, We explore how occupational therapists offer a more integrated approach by recognising the mother–infant dyad as a unit of care.

In exploring these intersections, we offer novel frameworks to strengthen how therapists can address complexity, power, and identity – not only in women’s health, but across diverse human experiences. We offer these initiatives to encourage practitioners, educators, and researchers to move beyond individualised care models and toward frameworks that centre gender, justice, and occupation as inseparable domains of wellbeing.

Raising awareness: What occupational therapy can offer

Occupational therapy offers powerful tools for supporting women’s health, but the profession continues to be under-recognised in practice. This book seeks to change that. It is a public-facing resource, designed for OTs and interdisciplinary teams, health system leaders, and communities.

We want to raise awareness of what occupational therapists already do, and what we could be doing more of. Whether through one-to-one therapy, group work, health promotion, or policy advocacy, occupational therapists are well placed to work collaboratively and holistically, addressing the everyday, meaningful, and structural determinants of women’s wellbeing.

For women. For mothers. For the profession. For the future.

This book does not ask women to cope better, strive harder, or fix themselves. Instead, we ask health systems to do better, to become more inclusive, relational, and grounded in responding to women’s everyday realities.

We offer frameworks, not prescriptions. Questions, not simple answers. This approach aims to encourage this movement’s continued growth in research, policy, practice, and in solidarity.

Occupational therapists offer uniquely important services, and the potential to improve women’s wellbeing through innovative, collaborative care is worth investing in.  This book is our collective invitation to reflect and respond together to enhance women’s wellbeing during matrescence, motherhood, and perinatal transitions, holistically as a team.

Enhancing Women’s Wellbeing During Matrescence, Motherhood, and Perinatal Transitions

Guided by research and occupational therapy practices, this evidence-based text maps how occupational therapists and the allied health collective can holistically promote women’s health, wellbeing, and self-efficacy during matrescence – the bio-psycho-social-political-spiritual-developmental journey and rite of passage of mother-becoming.

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