A PARENTING website has launched a campaign to make mums happy after research showed they are three times more likely to suffer from postnatal depression than their own mothers. The four-week long campaign, which was launched last Wednesday (May 17) by

A PARENTING website has launched a campaign to make mums happy after research showed they are three times more likely to suffer from postnatal depression than their own mothers.

The four-week long campaign, which was launched last Wednesday (May 17) by Netmums, a UK based parenting website, has already attracted 6,500 UK mums with at least 1,000 of them from Cambridgeshire.

Zoe Tinkler, from the Huntingdon Netmums team, which has several hundred members, said: "Research has shown that people are least happy when they are looking after young children - often because they find themselves isolated and tired.

"Netmums aims to help connect people to support them and build communities and the aim of this campaign is to show people that by doing a few simple things each day they can feel better."

The Make Mums Happy campaign aims to improve the lives of mothers by providing daily e-mails offering advice, tips and daily exercises.

Sally Russell, managing director of Netmums, said: "The advice we send out is really simple and designed to make mums feel less stressed. On the first day of the campaign we asked mums to say hello to an elderly person and introduce themselves to a mother they have never met before. We also asked them to treat themselves to a pedicure once they had completed those two tasks."

The mothers have also taken part in a happiness test designed by Richard Reeves from the BBC programme, Making Slough Happy. The test has 22 words listed such as inspired or upset and mothers were asked to grade from one to 10 how they felt in terms of those words. The end score was out of 100 and the average score is 52.

Mrs Russell added: "At first glance the test results seem to show some mothers scoring 87, which means they are happy and others scoring as low as 19, which shows they are very unhappy." Mothers will be asked to re-take the test at the end the campaign to see if it has made a difference.

If successful the Netmums team hope to re-launch the campaign next year.

INFORMATION: To sign up to the Making Mums Happy Campaign or to find out more visit www.netmums.com/makingmumshappy