Having a new member of the family is no small matter. Many families, particularly the Chinese, will employ stay-in confinement ladies to help out. However, choosing the right confinement lady is an issue. When our child was born six years ago, we actually went through hell, initially choosing and later dealing with the confinement lady.

Most confinement ladies only work for the money and would not be bothered with the welfare of the baby. We got our confinement lady from a confinement agency, “reputable” as they claimed. At night, our confinement lady would give our baby smashed sleeping pills. When we found broken pieces of sleeping pills on the table, we confronted her but she denied all knowledge.

Due to concern of the sleeping pills substance in our baby's body, we took our child for a checkup. Our baby had to undergo a blood test. Imagine the torture of having needles poked into both his hands at the age of only 14 days!

We complained to the confinement agency, which agreed to investigate and gave us another confinement lady. But as expected, the new confinement lady was not any better; in fact, she was even worse.

In the end, even with about seven days left to the 30-day agreement we had with the agency, we asked the second confinement lady to leave and managed on our own.

Reflecting back, the right thing to do was actually to ask ourselves a very fundamental question - is confinement really needed in this modern world? Confinement has no proven scientific basis, yet it's still followed blindly by many mothers.

Secondly, even if one would still want to follow the confinement traditions, then the next best thing to do is to get someone trusted such as a mother or mother-in-law to help out. However, in this modern era, not many would volunteer for such arduous work. So, in the end, be prepared to DIY!

Keith Low