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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   1053 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for September 11, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

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Life announcement: I am going to become a father! (Typical caveats, if medically everything goes well etc)

It wasn’t planned, but we would probably try in 1-2 years with my partner anyway so it wasn’t an unpleasant surprise either.

Still a bit early so we haven’t told anyone outside of close family. Really weird to keep interacting with friends as if everything is normal and we are all ultimately careless young adults.

So dump on me any advise you can think of!

The baby is not amenable to reason and it cannot help it. Do not attempt to reason or negotiate with the baby.

Once it's old enough to observe and learn, you must lead by example. It will imitate everything. Do nothing and say nothing that is not appropriate for the child to replicate. Your behavior will be its behavior.

Congrats!

Father of two with a third on the way for me.

The advice in this thread is great. I read through a bunch to try and make sure I wasn't giving duplicate advice.

I'd add that your little one is going to come out with their own personality on day one. This is way more obvious when you've had a second kid.

My first child, very sweet and easy going, she came out and barely cried enough to let the doctors know her lungs worked. My second child came out screaming like a pterodactyl and had me and the nurses kinda reeling back like whoa. The second one has had a much more forceful and loud personality.

Some of the ease or difficulty of parenting will be related to their personality, so don't let the first child either give you a big head if it's too easy, or discourage you if it's too hard. Its going to be a bit of the luck of the draw.

Congratulations!!!! Welcome to the ranks of parenthood; life is good over here. I do have some sobering advice for first time parents:

Do not shake the baby.

Whenever I give this advice to new parents, they look at me like I'm insane. Of course they aren't going to shake the baby -- they aren't monsters.

But they don't understand -- they have not yet had to deal with the sleep deprivation, the overwhelming feeling of being lost and uncertain of how to care for a new baby for the first time, they don't know what it's like at three in the morning when your wife has begged you to get the baby to sleep because she's exhausted beyond words and she can't do it and you haven't slept either and you have work in four hours and the baby won't stop screaming and you JUST FED the baby and you JUST CHANGED the baby and what the HELL is this stupid baby screaming about and

So. Do not shake the baby. Put the baby down on the floor in a different room (you can put on a fan or noisemaker so you don't have to hear the baby cry for a few minutes). Go somewhere else, listen to some music that you like, watch a dumb youtube video, take a quick shower, get yourself a small splash of scotch, take a few minutes to calm down, and then try again. The baby will be okay without you for a few minutes.

Every parent I have ever talked to has gone through this. They are often ashamed to admit it. You're not a bad person for feeling rage and anger at your child in those desperate moments at night. Sleep depravation and the crushing isolation of new parenthood (especially in modern culture!) is a hell of a combination. It happens to all of us. It's going to be okay. You're going to get through it, you'll get better, and if you have more than one kid (which I highly recommend!) by the time #3 rolls around you'll be an expert. You've got this. You're going to be a great dad. Being a parent is wonderful.

Just don't shake the baby.

Good advice. Children are unrelenting like nothing I've ever experienced. I made a list and pinned it to a screen on my phone of reasons the baby could be crying, because when you're sleep deprived it's impossible to recall:

  • Sleep/tired
  • Dirty diaper
  • Gas
  • More food/milk
  • Bored/play
  • Hot
  • Cold
  • Bath time

Using this list saved us many hours of crying with realizations like "oh, yeah, he's still wearing his warm pajamas"

Nice list! My parents recall that I was an exceptionally awful baby and cried basically non-stop. So I am not very hyped for what is to come

After 3 kids, I've concluded that their temperament is effectively random. They'll be easy or hard in unpredictable ways, but it's never so easy that you'll feel like you've figured out all you need for parenting, and it's never so difficult that you can't get through it.

Congratulations!

My main advice would be: Parenthood is more about not fucking up than about giving them a perfect head start. Don't worry too much, and no, you don't need that much stuff.

You can't really improve your child much, you can only fuck 'em up. Good enough parenting 101. This is backed up by mountains of evidence and I agree completely (sometimes tone doesn't translate perfectly online, hence the ham fisted explanation I'm including here).

Enjoy the massive amount of free time and irresponsibility you still have.

Congratulations and good luck my man!

Advice from a dad of 3 for where you are right now:

  1. Don't tell family and friends until you get a heartbeat. Miscarriages are surprisingly common before that point.
  2. Strongly consider getting a doula. She'll be your support and counselor even when all the hospital staff are out taking care of other patients. My sister-in-law's doula resuscitated her daughter when she stopped breathing and the nurses were all out of the room. Our doula had us lay out a birth plan covering how we wanted to handle various contingencies; not having to think about all the little (and big) decisions while actively giving birth was really nice. It's also reassuring to turn to someone you trust and ask "is this normal?", without the feeling like they're answering how hospital policy and insurance require them to answer. Lastly, while I'm usually pretty good with words, for our first kid I said the absolutely stupidest things trying to support my wife during labor; my doula was able to calm my wife and give me hints to shut the fuck up for a while.
  3. My wife found a moms' club that was great to be part of. They set up a "meal train" to cook/deliver food through the first 2 weeks after the birth, which was nice. It also helped with play dates for babies, adult socialization, getting ideas for gadgets, etc. We started using a bottle warmer machine but seeing someone else just microwave it and stir it thoroughly was one of those "duh, why didn't we think of that" moments. And we got to try a friend's expensive bouncer instead of the cheap one we'd started with.
  4. We put all our kids to sleep on their backs as recommended by the professionals. Here's a long thread to consider: https://x.com/ruthgracewong/status/1818895404542627881. If I could do it all over again, I'd probably try to convince my wife to put our kids on their bellies, which they clearly preferred.

Mazel tov.

One thing that I did (which seems to have worked out well) is to constantly talk to the kid and narrate what you're doing and what's going on. Not in baby talk, but just generally "Now I'm cooking dinner, tonight we're having shepherd's pie. First we brown the ground turkey. Browning means we cook it in the pan for a while until it turns sort of brownish. Meat tastes much better when it's cooked, so that's why we do it.' Etc. Kids soak that up, even young babies. Sing to them, tell them stories, read them books.

Also my favorite saying for parenthood: 'The perfect is the enemy of the good.' Your kid will be fine. Try to set a decent example and they'll turn out well.

Congrats! You may have read some parenting-related threads previously that I've interacted in so apologies for repeating myself if so. (You aren't Dave Grohl.... are you?)

  • You should take advantage of the first months of the kid's life to remain more free. They're just sleeping in carriers, so bring them with you to go do stuff. The worst period of parenting is when they are no longer content just sleeping/laying around and want to move, but cannot walk.
  • Take shifts. Prepare your partner and yourself for each of you being allowed to be selfish. Sleeping in, getting some alone time, picking what's for dinner because it's easy.
  • Your kid will change your life as much as you let it. If you don't want TV at night to avoid waking them up, if you cancel seeing friends, if you make your food bland to share, etc. then you'll get it.
  • Aggressively eliminating kid-specific systems and objects from your life has been a good tactic that I had to push my wife on. No, we don't need special plates and sippy cups for the X-year-old.
  • One thing I was unprepared for is how unbelievably delicate baby skin is. Feels amazing, but it needs to stay extremely clean while rarely being rubbed very hard by cleaning rags. Do your best not to be the reason why they have a painful diaper rash because it's a super shitty feeling. In that vein, always keep them low to the ground where possible.
  • If your infant is extremely fussy, there typically really is something wrong. Get to know your kid and trust them by default. You'll get to learn what a real cry at night is vs a "bad dream". Go through the checklist: diaper, hungry, comfort, boredom, and only then give it more time to see if they'll cry it out. (But then, when you move them into a crib in their own room from a bassinet, definitely let them cry it out. Please.).
  • Kids like a lot of stuff. Early on, it's just touching things. Seeing things. Later on, it's smelling, tasting. Then it's watching, helping. Then talking. Even children like having a purpose, they like being helpful, and they develop emotions faster than you think. If you start loving quickly and treating them like they're a year older than they actually are, you'll be happily surprised all the time.

Sorry, it's a lot, just the tip of the iceberg. I'm basically a meatsack wrapped around opinions, so there's always more if you ask.

I'm basically a meatsack wrapped around opinions

I think we've got a new TheMotte motto!

The worst period of parenting is when they are no longer content just sleeping/laying around and want to move, but cannot walk.

I thought it was the first few months, before they stopped waking up needing feedings in the middle of the night, myself. My kids were never unhappy while being carried when they were pre-walking, and the "I'm getting a ton of exercise" stage was a welcome change from the previous "I hope I don't fall asleep while driving to work" stage.

(things then get awesome, with the "oh my God the little alien is trying to communicate, this is like First Contact" stage)

through the checklist: diaper, hungry, comfort, boredom, and only then give it more time to see if they'll cry it out. (But then, when you move them into a crib, definitely let them cry it out. Please.).

Can you expand on this? When do you move them into the crib? And why do you let them cry it out?

Edited for clarity. But what I mean is when they graduate from being in your room/bassinet into their own room and crib.

Many parents fail at this step by checking on the baby far too often. A baby crying at night can just be sad and has to tough it out. The statistics say it's 100% the way to go but it's hard. Families I know ship their kids to a sibling or parent for multiple days because mothers "can't take it".

My advice about the checklist is for when you're not acclimating them to sleeping alone.

If your infant is extremely fussy, there typically really is something wrong. Get to know your kid and trust them by default. You'll get to learn what a real cry at night is vs a "bad dream". Go through the checklist: diaper, hungry, comfort, boredom, and only then give it more time to see if they'll cry it out. (But then, when you move them into a crib, definitely let them cry it out. Please.).

If I can add a tip, teaching your baby some very basic signs is really, really helpful. At 4-6 months you can begin to teach simple signs for Hungry, Drink, Done, Play, Sleep etc, for my youngest two it helped in finding out what is wrong, and anecdotally they seemed to be more content once they were able to communicate even very basic information. Very useful in the time before verbal communication is possible. And the babies I have seen (my own kids and others) seem to pick it up reasonably quickly.

When teething, my youngest was able to sign "Tooth Medicine" when teething which was a godsend when he woke up screaming.

Congratulations! It's an amazing experience, so enjoy every second of it. Get as much rest as you can now, you're going to need it shortly!

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