What advice would you give yourself as a first-time parent?
11 answers
I would boil it down to these three:
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Trust your instincts. There is so much information out there and advise from folks who genuinely want to help that I can actually be somewhat counterproductive / overwhelming when having to decide. So, definitely listen to others you trust, educate yourself and so forth. But when faced with some decision, take a deep breath and go with what feels right for you, your baby and your partner.
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Do what you need aka put your own mask on first. The sleep deprivation is real. Physical exhaustion. Mental load. Plethora of emotions. Those first months can take a toll while you are learning to raise a baby and your whole life is changing abruptly (sense of identify, perceived loss of “freedom” and many other manifestations —all unique to each individual). If I were a first time parent again, I’d be a lot less apologetic with doing the things I just felt I needed to take care of myself. For example, every time an employee asks me for some time off to take care of their newborns I get shocked that they are even asking because my answer is always ‘yes of course, do what you need’. But I bet they are feeling anxious about asking for permission, say, after just returning from parental leave. It’s a bias we all have, but I found that others are way more understanding and supportive than we might believe
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Ask for help. Related to point #2, my final advice would be to reach out. Many people are ready willing and able to help! They might just not know how. Or might be shy about proactively doing things for you if they think it might be counterproductive (eg maybe they want to visit you but they think you prefer some time alone). So, ask away, and be specific, and you’ll be surprised! People will love to be told what to do to help you how you want to be helped.
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jon190
when i was getting ready to be a dad, perhaps without thinking about it too deeply, i believed that newborn babies arrived perfect: they had just spent the last nine months being built in an ideal environment, with no meaningful outside influences, and on their birth day they were clean slates ready to learn to be a person. you could say that on the question of “is it nature or nurture?” i was all in on nurture.
if you think about it, that’s a pretty stressful place to be. here i am, a brand new parent, barely capable of keeping my own life together, and i’m about to be handed a perfect baby — all i can realistically do is damage. i worried about everything: if she doesn’t get enough sleep, will her brain be too tired to learn? what if she gets too much sleep? will she become lazy? she should be exposed to just the right amount of social stimulation. she should get outside, but not so much that she’s exposed to pollution! she should hear soothing music, or maybe upbeat music, but nothing too aggressive. 😱
ok, i’m exaggerating — a bit — but the fact was that i felt like everything needed to be perfect, because she was perfect, and i didn’t want to mess her up. it was also paralyzing: every decision could have totally inadvertent and unknowable long-term consequences.
then we had our second baby. i had learned so much, and this time i was going to make fewer mistakes. but what i quickly learned was that he was just a completely different person from his sister. from day one, he saw the world differently than she did: he wanted to figure things out on his own, didn’t care much about safety, had an ironic sense of humor, and wanted NOTHING to do with vegetables. he was SO different in hundreds of subtle, surprising, annoying, adorable ways.
my brain slowly — but eventually — realized that these two people were people long before i met them, and nothing i could do would change who they are.
so my advice to my past self would be: your job as a dad is not to protect and shape your kids into who you want them to be, it’s to help them navigate this crazy world — including the craziness they brought with them — so they can live their very best lives.
and just for the record: my kids are still 100% perfect.
- ritu—<3 <3
ritu2551
This one’s a bit technical, but I wish I’d known about the link between eczema and serious food allergies. Both my kids developed eczema at around 2 months old, but with my first, our pediatrician just told us casually to keep her skin moisturized and so I had no idea how dangerous an unbroken skin barrier was. I was eating a ton of peanuts and cashews to increase my breastmilk supply, and all that nut dust was constantly on my hands and on her inflamed skin, training her immune system to treat it as an irritant and the enemy. She’s now allergic to peanuts and cashews. With my second, I had learned a lot from our allergist and from poring over allergy research online so as soon as the eczema showed up, right on schedule at 2 months, I was ON IT with wet wraps and an array of creams. We also got rid of all nuts from the house until we could introduce solid foods at 4 months, when we started feeding him a blend of nut butters every day so his immune system would learn that these were food and not freak out. He has no allergies and can eat whatever he wants. I just wish I could have given his big sister that freedom.
On a related note, I wish I could give myself more grace, and not to feel so much guilt over all the times I mess up.
rachel8302
Here are a few things I wish someone had told me before I had my first baby:
Milk Supply
A lot of moms struggle with milk supply. I have. Two of my sister-in-laws have. If you end up breastfeeding, great. If you end up doing formula, great. #fedisbestCrying
You will cry all the time for a couple weeks after you give birth. It’s normal.Gas
Newborn babies have a lot of gas. LOTS. I’m sure it’s a weird experience for them. Anyway, it takes a couple months for them to work out the whole tooting thing. We found what helped the most was to lay them on their back (either on the floor or slightly angled on your legs – we’d do it sitting on the couch with our legs propped on the coffee table) and make bicycle motions with their legs. Very helpful.Crevices
Babies have so many squishy little crevices, that get sore because they see no air (especially around their neck). So each morning we’d clean of their neck crevices with a wet washcloth and get some A&D in there. It made a world of difference until they could hold up their heads.Tiger in the tree hold
Google it. It’s amazing. It was the only thing that would calm down my daughter.Sleeping
It takes about 6 weeks for babies to figure out night vs day (they don’t produce melatonin at first so dark vs light means nothing). Nothing you can do will speed it up all that much so don’t worry about it. Just do your regular thing, keeping quieter and darker at night and they eventually figure out you sleep at night and play during the day.- ritu—oof milk supply! the bane of all things! all the prenatal classes we went to were you “you will be a glowing mother goddess reclining on a lotus leaf while your baby feeds on unlimited liquid gold”. Ummm… yeah no. Not even close! False marketing!!
- rachel—Agreed!! I was so not prepared for reality.
EMucha3853
Grace. Your baby is new a this whole outside-the-womb, making it “on my own” thing. That sounds super hard to me, so if it feels hard supporting someone through that, it’s ok. Guaranteed that baby is offering you something you’ve never had to do in that exact way before, too. You both deserve all the patience and grace.
Love. If you love your baby and you’re doing what feels centered in love, sustainability, and development for you and your baby, you’re doing it right. Kids with loving parents are raised in all sorts of different ways and, in many ways, we all turn out roughly the same. What your baby needs the most is your love.
YOU’ve got this. You know more than
- EMucha—On the you’ve got this. You know more than you think — take advice out there as a way of surveying the landscape, but build your house the way it works for you. Sometimes it just takes trying it and remembering that very few choices and approaches are set in stone. But you can trust yourself in this job — no one is more expert at raising your kid than you.