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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   1944 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 20, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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After trying for years, my wife is pregnant with our first. Any advice from the parents of the Motte? Books, bloggers, etc. I know about Emily Oster, but it is challenging to find solid advice for parenting.

Congratulations! It's an adventure.

Have a support network. Family, friends, church, what-have-you, just find other people who have had kids who will understand what you're going through and can sometimes help out. Before the baby pops out, make friends with other pregnant couples (there are apps and websites aimed at exactly this demographic). Taking care of two similar-age kids who are friends is not that much harder than taking care of one, and the ability to get a few hours' break by trading coverage with each other is priceless.

Also, enjoy it. There's lots that's really difficult and your life is about to change forever, but it's wonderful at the same time. I love spending time with my kid, and every new thing he figures out both makes me proud of him and also reminds me that he's going to need me less and less from here on out.

Don't buy anything new. I assume you'll probably have family and friends that will gift/loan you a lot, but even if not it's so easy nowadays to find second hand stuff for way cheaper, and it's probably been used liked 10 times total.

I don't have the link, but in some ACX comments a few months back someone linked a blog series on back sleeping for babies. The conclusion was that the evidence for the benefits re:SIDS was extremely weak, while there was some good evidence that back sleeping has quite negative effects in other domains. We've slept our child on front, back and side, but she falls asleep really easily everyway so for us it's been less important, but could be useful when yours arrives

As soon as you feel comfortable going out of the house with the baby, take full advantage of it. While the baby is young enough to be content sitting/napping in their stroller, you can savor the last bit of dinkiness allowable. By 8 months, your baby will be restless and the pleasure of going out to eat or do other adult oriented activities with them will take a deep dive for the next several years.

Spend months 2-7 going out and socializing with a baby in tow.

Nearly 4 months in with our first so I’m far from an expert but this is very relevant to me right now. Some thoughts:

We limited visitors to just my mother in law (whom we live with) and my husband’s siblings for the first 2 weeks. I cannot recommend this enough. Everyone and their neighbor wanted to meet our baby but entertaining guests while I was bleeding, in pain, and could barely get out of bed was the last thing I wanted to do newly postpartum.

Hopefully your wife will have an easy pregnancy and delivery but be mentally prepared for things to go off plan. My labor and delivery was basically exactly the opposite of what I wanted and postpartum recovery has been waaaay more difficult than I could’ve anticipated. Pelvic floor therapy is a thing and your wife doesn’t have to “just live with it” if she has issues. Try to be supportive and understanding and do as much as possible with housework and the baby.

One thing I wish I would’ve done while pregnant was the whole freezer meal prep thing. Having healthy food to eat while breastfeeding and recovering from delivery is really helpful to me physically and mentally but can be hard to prepare when I’m home alone with baby all day.

Every baby is different. Try not to compare your baby to your friends’ babies too much, especially when it comes to sleep. Our baby is not a good sleeper and my husband and I are still taking it in shifts every night 4 months out because our little one is up every 1-2 hrs. I’ve had people tell me that he’s probably cold, hungry, sleeping too much during the day etc., and no, he is not, he’s just a crap sleeper.

Newborns will basically sleep anywhere but around 6-8 weeks they will “wake up” to the world and you’ll need to actively start trying to put them to sleep. This seems like a no-brainer but babies change and develop so quickly that sometimes it can be hard to catch up with their changing needs. Now that hubby is back to work at the end of the week he comes home and says it’s like trying to relearn the baby all over again because the baby is so different and doing different things.

This might not apply to you and your wife but postpartum hormones are no joke and in my experience it was really hard for me to not be overprotective of the baby, especially in the first couple months. It was really difficult for me to hear him cry and not “take over”. The best thing I did was let my husband learn to soothe the baby in his own way because now he can actually help but it was hard to give him that space.

If your wife plans on breastfeeding it might be a good idea to introduce a bottle of expressed milk once or twice a week. We did not do this and now our baby won’t take a bottle so when we have a sitter we’re limited to 3-4 hrs away.

Breastfeeding can be really hard even when everything is going well.

Facebook marketplace is a goldmine for used/secondhand baby items. Some things you need to buy new (car seat) but most can be bought used super cheap and are in really good shape because babies grow out of things so quickly.

Every baby is different. Try not to compare your baby to your friends’ babies too much, especially when it comes to sleep. Our baby is not a good sleeper and my husband and I are still taking it in shifts every night 4 months out because our little one is up every 1-2 hrs. I’ve had people tell me that he’s probably cold, hungry, sleeping too much during the day etc., and no, he is not, he’s just a crap sleeper.

You have my sympathy.

Our first kid was a crap sleeper for 2 years and it almost killed me.

Someone asked me once what I wanted for Christmas and I just said "... 3 nights in a row where I can sleep 8 hours a night" and I had to leave the room in case I started lolsobbing.

The second kid? No problem.

Thanks. I keep hoping we get lucky with the next one because the chronic sleep deprivation is a killer. Every night I hope is the night he’ll sleep 4 hrs uninterrupted but unfortunately it hasn’t happened yet. But I keep reminding myself it will happen one day…even if it’s in 2 years(!) :/

I'm sorry if this is a stupid question, but why can't you just ignore a crying baby at night? Call it ferberizing, call it self-preservation, whatever.

ferberizing

Looking up this term has convinced me that any research related to child rearing is absolutely insane. This should be the easiest thing to test. Instead, every article I saw was either unabashedly pro- or anti-Ferber, and bent over backwards to explain why the lack of clinical evidence supports their position. Then they go back to evo-psych.

(For what it’s worth, it probably works, so the pro-side actually has studies to cite.)

This is like reverse Gell-Mann amnesia. Maybe every field looks like this.

Looking up this term has convinced me that any research related to child rearing is absolutely insane.

Yes. Fucking everyone in the world has opinions on parenting. It's worse than politics.

Re: Ferberizing

I think if I knew we were looking at 2 years of that shit we would have been much more hard about it. Something about being in the midst of it made it unthinkable.

We were all set to do it with the second kid but she barely put up a fuss.

It’s a minefield. Just this weekend I saw a couple of relatives, they have a baby, and they have looked completely exhausted for the better part of two years now. The light has gone out of their eyes. When I suggested the same thing as above, that maybe they should ignore him at night and wean him off, a grandmother rudely told me that as a childless man I had no right to an opinion. Fine, it's not my business, but if I'm right, who is going to tell them? I'm sure that the father too would be told off because it's seen as the mother's domain and her prerogative, and it would be 'selfish' for him to complain when she likely does a bigger share of the (useless) night work. There is no debate, and so they keep suffering.

Mom and I are were too bleeding heart to do that.

One thing I wish I would’ve done while pregnant was the whole freezer meal prep thing. Having healthy food to eat while breastfeeding and recovering from delivery is really helpful to me physically and mentally but can be hard to prepare when I’m home alone with baby all day.

I second this and if you can get the grandparents involved in cooking for you then that can be really helpful. My mother really wanted to help out but was cognizant of that visiting too often could be a more of a burden than help so she got to cook and freeze meals for us that she could drop off once a week or so the first couple of months.

She got to be involved and help out and we got a really valuable help. The alternative had probably been a lot more takeout and very simple meals, and m frankly much more stress.

All parents are different but if someone has a strong desire to be helpful then this is something valuable they can do.

I liked Mayo Clinic books.

From a more personal standpoint: nothing you do matters much, so unclench your sphincters. You have to be [actively malicious](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)) to fuck up your child. You see people from dysfunctional homes grow up into upstanding citizens, you see people from good families shoot up schools. Your socioeconomic status and genes have already defined something like 85% of your kid's future. The remaining part will be shared between you, school, friends and random internet strangers.

Formula vs breastfeeding, co-sleeping vs separate rooms, letting the baby cry it out vs singing lullabies, two walks a day vs no set number of walks a day, daytime sleeping outside vs sleeping inside... who cares, just keep your wife happy.

You will fuck something up. You will set a bad example for your kid. You will feel like you don't spend enough time with him or her. You will lose your temper and make the kid cry in fear. It's okay to feel bad about this; it's not okay to redefine yourself as a bad dad just because you've done this.

Savor every minute of free time you have from now until the baby arrives.

A lot of what you remember about being a kid isn't going to be relevant until your kid's older. Sounds obvious, but it isn't. Even if you had younger siblings, you may have blacked out the first three months of their lives from your memory.

Reading to a baby is a way to get them exposed to the phonology of the language they are immersed in. Genuine baby books that have good rhymes are rare though. Bill Grossman is one of my favorite children's poets, then there's Seuss and Silverstein. At that age it's not really about the pictures yet.

At around 1-2 years old, it's all about the pictures. They can't follow the plot too well, but they will love to point to things and have you say what they are.

Diaper blowouts are a thing that you can't really avoid. Always have a change of clothes for the baby, and maybe a second shirt for you and mommy. If diaper blowouts get common, that is a sign to go a size up on diapers.

The first three months are just about teaching a baby to eat and sleep. Because these things are best learned at home, we don't really travel outside the house without the baby except for maybe a 10 minute walk during their most wakeful time. Doctor visits are the exception and you'll have a ton of them until the baby is 6 months old. If I have to, I'll go shopping with the baby but kids can't sit in grocery cart seats until they are 1 years old.

Lots of parents like to use baby chest carriers. I struggled with "baby wearing."

  • Baby is near the boobs and can smell milk. This makes baby hungry and cranky.
  • Can't lean forward, it's hard to do things. Some women claim they can do the dishes, sweep the floor, and dance like a Disney princess while baby wearing. I cannot.
  • Baby overheats.
  • If baby naps in the carrier, they only take a short nap and then are cranky. I've never had a baby nap 1.5 hours in a chest carrier the way they do in their proper bed. (A baby will happily nap in a car seat carrier for hours if you let them.)
  • If you get two kids, and the older one needs to be picked up, you can't. A stroller keeps my arms free.

I recommend getting a stroller system that works with your car seat. Baby falls asleep in the car and then you can transfer the car seat to a stroller. Baby stays asleep up until the doctor's testing reflexes.

Books I read and stuck with me:

Mom Genes: Inside the New Science of Our Ancient Maternal Instinct by Abigail Tucker. Talks about the changes that will happen with your wife. It's almost as significant as a second puberty and comes with many challenges and benefits.

Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting by Pamela Druckerman. What sets this apart from a lot of baby books is that it suggests relaxing and not trying to deliver the perfect experience to your children is how to raise the happiest children.

Babywise - the most controversial book ever and you can probably get a lot of the good advice elsewhere, but here are the good things I got from it:

  • Sometimes we wake a baby if the time is appropriate.
  • Babies are just like humans in that they will get hungry and sleepy at around the same times every day, if you are consistent in feeding them and getting them sleep at around the same times every day. Not so much in the <3 months age range, but 4 months and older for sure.
  • Nursing should take 20 ish minutes, switch sides and interact with the baby to keep the baby awake, don't let the baby snack on foremilk and never get hind milk.
  • Burping works by consolidating little bubbles into bigger bubbles. I feel like my technique improved once I understood that.
  • The schedules in the book were helpful guides.

In the end, the baby year is the hardest, and the first baby is the hardest. But babies are pretty simple. The complicated stuff comes when you try to figure out what "Authoritative" parenting means.

The only thing I can recommend for the Toddler years is to repeat back what you think the kid is saying before responding to it. A lot of preschool/toddler conversations go:

"I Want X"

"We need to do Y instead."

"I want X!!!"

"We need to do Y instead. Don't you want Y?"

"I Want X!!!"

"I know you want X. X is really great. I'm sorry we can't do X right now."

"OK."

With and adult, they would understand that when you bring up Y you're also addressing X. But a toddler doesn't make that connection, especially when they're emotional. Sometimes just addressing X directly, even if you're not adding anything of value, is what they need. They just need to know that you understand them.

Best to you and your wife, and hopes for an untroubled pregnancy and healthy delivery. Once you have that, really everything else is gravy. If you want advice as the dad: Your wife will be doing a lot of the difficult parts for the foreseeable future, so pick up the slack whenever possible.

A couple of baby books that I thought were worthwhile. Our first was born about 6 months ago.

  • The Baby Owner's Manual (Borgenicht) - A comprehensive guide to the practical things you will encounter with the baby (How much do they feed? How many diapers do they go through a day? What are typical weight/height percentiles? How do you clean the baby?)
  • The Happiest Baby on the Block (Karp) - Talks about the behavior of newborns and how to calm them down/put them to sleep.
  • Baby Meets World (Day) - Explains baby behavior through their eyes, so you can understand their behavior better
  • Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child (Weissbluth) - All about sleep for babies and children. I only read the sections for <1yr olds. A bit lengthier than it could've been. It is remarkable how challenging it is to get some children to sleep.
  • Your Baby's First Year (Altmann) - A reference book, given to us by our pediatrician. The "official" medical guidance that our pediatrician dispenses is consistent with this text.
  • What to Expect when you're Expecting - I did not read this but my wife did, my understanding is that this is the gold standard for pregnancy books.

The learning curve to taking care of a baby (speaking for the first six months, and assuming your baby does not have any special needs) is incredibly simple. I went from never having touched a baby in my life, to being able to feed, change, carry, swaddle, burp, put to sleep, etc. within a week or so.

Thousands of years of evolution have given you the tools for this - read a couple of books, talk to parents or grandparents for family-specific topics, and you'll be good. Wishing you the best.

All parenting is by guess and by golly.

If you're doing any kind of pump/bottle feeding, make liberal use of the dishwasher and don't bother with hand washing. The oven at 250 for 20 minutes can remove most smells from silicone, including dishwasher soap.

Read books, lots of books, but the actual reading will be mostly after the first year. Until then it's shapes and contrast and colors. Repetition is king.

Take pictures, take notes. Babies change week to week, month to month. Tell stories to your wife, to your family, about the mundanities.

Baby food is overrated. By 6 months they can eat bananas and blueberries (squished), and most of the purees aren't worth much. There are silicone chew pops with holes that work well for fruits, frozen or otherwise, that let them taste without worrying about choking. A baked sweet potato is practically a puree anyway. Most nutrition is from breast milk until a year anyway.

Have a white noise machine. I like the hatch, but a simple dumb noise machine works fine. Sing to your child. Nursery rhymes, poems, simple songs, folk songs, and the stuff you might have learned in elementary school. Make up dumb rhyming or rhythmic phrases to entertain.

Again for after the first year, but get a membership at a local zoo or aquarium or similar, and then go regularly. Outdoor time is wonderful.

If you can run a hose from an indoor faucet, you can deliver bath water to a splash pad for fun even when the weather is cool.

Don’t freak out, you’ll be fine. There’s 10,000,000 people telling you how if you don’t do this or don’t do that you’ll ruin the kid. All of them are lying or delusional. Your kid will be fine with less than perfect, he will not be fine with parents that have driven themselves crazy.

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