Ask HN: Concise, pragmatic baby manual for first-time dad?
Our baby is due in September and I want to be prepared. What is the best data-driven, tactical field-guide that you found before becoming a parent?
I've started reading a few, but there's a mountain of choice and so far, these books are about 80% fluff. They pontificate like recipe websites, despite having no ads in the pages. I'd ideally like to find a book that goes over:
1. What I need to do
2. When I need to do it
3. Why it's important
4. Absolutely nothing else
I'd especially like to avoid pseudo-science / instructions backed up by no data, paragraphs congratulating me on being a modern participatory dad, and anecdotes.
121 comments
[ 52.4 ms ] story [ 3143 ms ] threadBaby tips
- have some of the next size diaper around so you can try it earlier instead of making the kid wear too-small diapers for a week, leaking everywhere. this happened to me every size transition
- precut a bunch of little rectangles of paper towel for butt cream application
- pump and use a bottle or just use formula if the baby is having a hard time eating in the first week, don’t let the breast dogmatists scare you
- early tummy time with them kneeling on the bed, head on your stomach. it’s easier and they can actually lift
- keep a box of gloves near the changing table. rather than leaving someone watching them on the table to wash your hands, just take off the gloves
- changing table in your bedroom (we didn’t do this the first time)
- don’t wear slippers in the hospital, wear something harder you can really clean
- soap bottles for bath should have pumps for one-handed operation
- don’t be afraid to give tylenol when they’re sick. there were several times we held off when we absolutely should have given it
- try to avoid having too many visitors in the hospital. you need to sleep or at least rest instead. we had both our families visiting the first time and it was so much worse than covid-era visitation
- they like to be swaddled much tighter than you think you should
- bring velcro swaddle blanket to the hospital
Products
- cardinal gates stairway angle gate
- teether thing you can put fruit in
- phone tripod for facetime
- bottle washing box for dishwasher
- hand pump is a cheap way to relieve pressure
- lanolin and hydrogels
- velcro swaddles and then sleep sacks
- Dutailier glider
- a decent otoscope is handy to have around (you are constantly wondering whether they're cranky because they have an ear infection) but it's _very_ hard to see an infant's eardrum
Lowering fevers is not necessary in any way, does not protect, it does not help heal, the best you could say is maybe it makes a baby (and child) a bit more comfortable. But in exchange the illness lasts a little bit longer.
And this is not my personal opinion, this is what the best available studies say: fever reducers have no medical value.
"The most consistently identified serious concern of caregivers and health care providers is that high fevers, if left untreated, are associated with seizures, brain damage, and death. It is argued that by creating undue concern over these presumed risks of fever, for which there is no clearly established relationship,"
https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/127/3/e20103...
Also not sure if you have a kid but I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that making a sick infant comfortable is not worthwhile.
"It should be emphasized that fever is not an illness but is, in fact, a physiologic mechanism that has beneficial effects in fighting infection"
"and limited data have revealed that fever actually helps the body recover more quickly from viral infections, although the fever may result in discomfort in children."
"There is no evidence that children with fever, as opposed to hyperthermia, are at increased risk of adverse outcomes such as brain damage."
> that making a sick infant comfortable is not worthwhile.
Keep in mind in exchange the illness last longer. There are other ways to make a sick infant comfortable. You nurse them, you hold them, a cool cloth on the forehead helps a lot. Some babies like the vibration of a car ride, parents usually know what makes their baby happy - the hard part typically is finding time to focus on doing that. Obviously it's easier if they sleep in their crib (and for some parents that's the best option).
But what you should NOT do is think "My baby is sick I have to give the baby Tylenol!" You don't. (I've even seem parents wake their baby because it was time for the next dose!) A bit to help with comfort? OK. But the main thing is don't think you are treating their illness.
Tylenol is not for treating the illness. Maybe the parents you're referring to don't know what it does. It is meant for decreasing the intensity of the symptoms. One of those symptoms could be a fever and potentially the body aches that come with that. But then you have to define the word "fever".
Giving the baby Tylenol as you're describing is probably not a good idea. Using it as the tool it is meant to be I would say is.
Keeping a change of clothes and a couple diapers in the car is another thing to recommend, you will eventually forget the diaper bag, or forget to reload it. Having last ditch emergency supplies is a lifesaver.
I'd add a NoseFrida as another product, those bulb type snot suckers have poor control, and get disgusting on the inside. It's a bit weird the first time, but it works a treat.
I'd be a little more specific and suggest limiting to one visitor at a time. With two visitors, it was easy to have each parent occupied by a visitor and nobody notice the sleeping baby starting to stir and then end up with a difficult to console baby, instead of intervening earlier and keeping more calm. At least that was my experience. Newborn is not the stage to let the kiddo figure everything out themselves ;)
Unless you want the child in their own room as soon as possible. If you can hear your child from your own bedroom having a room dedicated to the child is a good way to keep a little bit of space to yourself and your partner (and stop your bedroom from smelling like baby poop and wet wipes).
Some people are into what's known as 'attachment parenting' where you keep the baby in a cot directly adjacent to the bed with one side which can be lowered for emotional attachment or something. If you really want that, look into the safety issues and buy the right gear.
There are also people who advocate sleeping in the same bed as the baby. Those people are idiots. Don't listen to them.
> - phone tripod for facetime
For whom? Not for the baby unless one of the parents is away for weeks on end, that's for sure. Babies don't need digital devices. Toddlers don't either (introduce music of course). They'll spend a large part of their lives glued to a 'smart' black rectangle in all likelihood, no need to rush it.
> - Dutailier glider
> - a decent otoscope
Better: don't buy large expensive stuff until you actually need it. Often you don't. Ask people in your family about stuff you actually need, and stuff some people might need. Every baby is different.
In most non-western cultures, the mother sleeping in close proximity to the baby is the norm and anything else is considered quite unusual.
Just because it is or was normal in some cultures, doesn't make it safe or a negligible risk. Ignoring evidence-based guidelines for something like this just because it feels better is perhaps not the best way to go about it — I would say 'idiotic'.
Sleeping in close proximity can be done in other ways, like the co-sleeping cots that one can put next to the parental bed. It's still not necessary or even good for the baby really, but at least it can be done without unduly increasing the risk of child mortality.
Just use your fingers and then wash your hands.
> - pump and use a bottle or just use formula if the baby is having a hard time eating in the first week, don’t let the breast dogmatists scare you
Agreed.
> - keep a box of gloves near the changing table. rather than leaving someone watching them on the table to wash your hands, just take off the gloves
Way too much work IMO, and if you have more than one, they will spread those gloves all over the house.
> - changing table in your bedroom (we didn’t do this the first time)
Just change them on the bed. We used to use a changing pad on the bed, but once you get good at it, you can change them so fast and with zero mess so we don't even need the pad any more.
> - try to avoid having too many visitors in the hospital. you need to sleep or at least rest instead. we had both our families visiting the first time and it was so much worse than covid-era visitation
Great advice. Our COVID-era baby was super peaceful, so we just did a "no visitors" policy for our more recent baby. Absent complications, you're only there for a day or two, they can wait.
> - they like to be swaddled much tighter than you think you should
> - bring velcro swaddle blanket to the hospital
Excellent advice and I often say the same about swaddlers. They are key.
- Hey! I have this new employee. What should I do?
- Hey! I have this new job. What should I do?
You’ll get plenty of generic advice. Some of it might be useful. Most of it won’t apply to your “case”.
- Make sure they have filled out (this list of required legal documents before you can start work)
- Make sure you have an onboarding plan. Here's what an example onboarding plan might look like.
- Have 1:1s with your manager. Here are some topics you might want to cover in your first week, first month, first quarter, and first year.
For a baby-related illustration - I know, for example, that I'll need to change diapers & make sure the baby is clean. I've never changed a baby's diaper before, so I'll probably watch a bunch of youtube videos and also ask if a friend with a baby will give me a tutorial beforehand. But that's a known unknown for me. I would like to know all of the other basic knowledge that every parent is going to need to have, in order to be successful. So I'm not looking for "advice," I truly am looking for the most fundamental, universal guidance. A great example from my wife's doctor was a 1-page list of things she should stop eating and a 1-page list of medications she can safely take while pregnant.
For me, where I live, cloth diapers were not so great. If you have access to a good, convenient diaper service, then yes, the savings in water/power probably come out ahead. I did not, so disposable were better; even though they made a more permanent impact in a landfill, they made a smaller overall impact. It's not as easy a problem as one might think, and I tried to do the best I could. And, for what it's worth, the cost either way is more or less a wash.
All of my kids were fantastic sleepers. Some kids aren't, and nobody knows why. My kids were good eaters, not all are. Dunno why. I try to resist the urge to tell people the way we did things is the correct way, because it's possible that we just got a good roll on the dice on those things.
There are a lot of gimmicky things out there, and a lot of gimmicky ideas. You won't know if they work for you or not until you try them, and they may work for reasons that are completely unrelated. "Be flexible" isn't much of a plan, but it's the only one that works consistently because it isn't much of a plan.
That pretty much sums up all the advice, I think. Good luck, kids are fun.
edit: You have time to get a puppy, now; and learn to deal with all the shit on easy mode. When the baby happens the puppy will be the perfect age to be an actual help watching the baby, and help raise the kid.
> That pretty much sums up all the advice, I think. Good luck, kids are fun.
Agreed.
> edit: You have time to get a puppy, now; and learn to deal with all the shit on easy mode. When the baby happens the puppy will be the perfect age to be an actual help watching the baby, and help raise the kid.
What is this insanity? Don't do this. I love dogs, but a young dog + a baby is a recipe for disaster. They do not help raise babies.
We did something similar for our second-to-last baby, mostly because our previous dog died and we wanted to decrease the chances that the new baby would be allergic. But a dog generally just fights for your attention (increasing your stress) and, worse, will wake the baby up occasionally if the dog is one that barks at visitors.
Also, the baby-industrial complex loves this binary view because it allows them to sell products that are "better".
--------------------- Fortune Begin ------------------------
They're basically very smelly houseplants until they get to the crawling age. You're constantly terrified that they're going to randomly die on you, but the rules for preventing that outcome are straightforward and hard to forget. -- Thomas Ptacek, giving advice to a new father
---------------------- Fortune End -------------------------
It’ll give some insight into small things that if you get them wrong can have really negative impacts.
1) no amount of books or articles will prep you for what to come 2) find a good pediatrician, listen to them 3) use your common sense, avoid comparing your baby behaviour with others
As for recommendations, the one that I found useful is https://parentingscience.com/ that usually has links to studies / science papers in their articles
sorry you are completely wrong here, this new life episode has no pragmatic cheatsheet, forget everything from your career, enjoy it and be patient!
What you need to do:
When you need to do it: Why it is important: Good luck.As time goes on and you have a toddler, things even out significantly.
Mom's job is not to sacrifice herself to take care of the child. She must both preserve herself, go through the healing process, and help take care of the child.
Dad's job is to also handle any healing, to help take care of mom, to help take care of the child, and to generally keep the house functional.
If Mom kills herself taking care of the child or sacrifices herself to take care of the child, that isn't functional. Something has gone wrong. If Dad has to sacrifice himself to take care of the child or the mother, something has also gone wrong.
You must _integrate_ the child into the family, not replace the family with the child. It is not just what works best for the child - it is what works best for the family as a whole. The child would love to constantly breast feed and comfort feed on mom forever - that is not functional for the mother, she must sleep and have time with the child off her nipple so she can continue to breast feed.
In the same way, it is not functional for dad to say, spend all his time cooking and cleaning and not sleeping. It is better for dad to sleep and some of the chores to go undone then it is to have a tidy home.
If you sacrifice yourself - if you spend and spend and spend - you will see it as a debt accruing that will never be paid back. You will breed resentment to your family. You will be unhappy and the family will no longer be a family. That does not work. It does not matter if you're the mother or the father, self sacrifice destroys families.
The family has to work as a whole. Everyone has to be integrated and the system has to work as a whole. What that looks like differs for every family and is an ongoing process, not a one time solution. The father and the mother have a relationship, and now baby is involved which means we went from 1 relationship to 3 (the baby has a separate relationship with each parent!). The family has to make that work not for a week or a month or a year, but for the rest of their lives.
A child doesn’t owe their parents jack shit.
Could dad hire someone else to be sacrificed?
The answer to all of the above should be "Well no!". Which should lead us back to the problem at hand: "Why is it ok to sacrifice _anyone_?" It's not.
That you had a child with a severe medical condition does not mean you become subhuman. It means the task of integrating the child into the family has a different success criteria (your child with Down's is probably not going to be a functional adult at 18). The child still has to be integrated into the family - as a whole. You don't get to elect a scapegoat and skip out on that task. No child should dominate a family, regardless the medical condition of that child. The family works as an entire unit, not with some unlucky soul having the life sucked out of them for convenience of everyone else.
The only thing you really need to do is try.
Just keep being there, keep watching your baby and doing your best to decide how to be your best.
The worst thing you can do is stop putting in the energy and just let time pass. Other than that, this is one of those things where simply making the effort is all that is really needed.
Other than that, the single most useful advice someone once gave me was whenever baby is throwing tantrums, won't stop crying and you feel like it's stressing you out, maybe making you a little angry, always remember that baby is not giving you a hard time. It is _having_ a hard time and there's nothing baby can do. No ability to deal with that whatsoever, it needs your help. It's a mindset that helped me take the edge off many times in the beginning and became natural later on.
This seems like a topic where it's good to assume that if they haven't told you, you shouldn't ask. People who are expecting or trying for a child will be excited enough to want to talk about it and if they haven't brought it up, there's a possibly sore reason for that.
In my journey with my wife, we have had two miscarriages. The grief I felt also took me by surprise.
Early on, my wife would say, "we got pregnant!" At the time, I thought that was silly. Sure, we conceived, but biologically, she was pregnant and I was not. And I said so.
Well. I was wrong.
When the first miscarriage happened, the grief took me by surprise. How could I feel a sense of loss, when I am not the one biologically carrying the baby? Yet, that sense of loss was there. And it was then I realized, my wife was right -- we got pregnant. This was more than biology.
While my wife's body was starting to change in obvious ways, more subtly, so was my role. It wasn't just my wife's body changing to accommodate a growing body, but we together as a family was changing to accommodate a child, and that include changes with me.
Well before the birth of the child, I was already a father. When the fetus died, that loss as a father is real, and so is the grief that goes with it. When my wife's body expels the corpse, that's a birth. And before the birth, there was a death.
When the fetus dies in the uterus, current medical practices won't induce that birth without a medical reason, so the mother will carry the dead child until her body naturally gives birth to it. For her, she's carrying that reminder for at least a few days. As the father, there may be some biological distance from there, but this is part of what the family experiences together.
My wife and I ended up doing a small funeral and wake. We named the baby, buried it on our lands. Funerals don't help the dead; it's in honoring the dead that funerals help those who live on.
OP, if you are reading this:
You are already a father, even if you have yet to hold your child in your arms.
And, the next major milestone is viability. Your wife probably knows which week that will be. This is the period in development that the child has a shot of staying alive even if not carried to full term. In between conception and birth are also check ups your wife will go through, including an organ scan and the glucose tests.
The internet is generally a terrible place to get parenting advice/support/etc from. For some reason it's a topic that brings out the most judgemental in people.
Parents of one child are often the worst to talk to. They have figured out what works for their one kid, and are quite unaware that it doesn't generalize at all.
Mothers will (usually) feel instant love for their new baby. Fathers will often not, and it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking there must be something wrong with you for that. There isn't, it's all just hormones. Wait, and those feelings will come over time.
I think that's all I've got. Good luck!
Parent of one child checking in -- strongly agree with you! I generally phrase myself very carefully around newer parents to avoid sounding like I'm giving general advice, and stress that I'm only talking about my experience with my kid -- and also, crucially, only when my thoughts on the matter are solicited.
The super judgey, sanctimonious tones of similar one-child parents who have everything figured out with their ONE SINGLE DATA POINT is really grating, and I try to steer the conversation away from there right away.
If the baby does not have colic and cries:
1) Needs milk 2) Needs changed 3) Needs sleep
If baby does have colic and cries
1) Lol probably needs nothing, but try all 3 above for good measure. 2) Endure for months on end until every woman in your extended family and your own marriage nearly self destructs because it turns out a baby that cries every waking hour for months on end is basically kryptonite for women. Treat it like you're going to be waterboarded for the better part of a year to see how devout you are for your marriage.
Emily Oster is the one author I'm familiar with who comes close to countering this trend, but even she gets too prescriptive sometimes.
The basics of parenting are very simple in theory and pretty hard in practice - stay available, stay patient, stay positive, divide and conquer tasks with your partner, take enough care of yourself to enable the above, adjust as needed. There's not much that's universal beyond that. Your kid's experience will be highly personal to your kid and you'll want to look at the tools and resources available to you (ranging from nannies and food service to bottles/bibs/furniture) and keep evaluating what's working and what's not.
(Also second the other comments referring to miscarriages. They are much more common than you might imagine, and of course incredibly challenging in part because they're so hard to discuss.)
Co-sleeping in particular is this bizarre thing where all the professionals warn against it as if you're playing Russian roulette, while half the people I know do it themselves (and are afraid to talk about it). Nevermind that essentially the rest of the world does it, and we did it before 5 minutes ago.
I get that folks have different preferences and level of comfort, but the rigidity and judgement that gets pushed is kind of hard to believe. It seems like safetyism run amok.
It's coauthored by a pediatrician, so the recommendations are evidence-based, but it's also practical and relatively concise.
[Disclaimer: The edition I read was published over a decade ago, but the latest edition doesn't appear to be radically different.]
We found Harvey Karp's Happiest Baby on the Block really helpful with our newborn. It contains a lot of fluff. Reading it ahead of time will have little value - you need to see/understand your baby's temperament to understand how to apply the approaches in the book.
Best of luck! Kids are awesome!
On the data driven side, Emily Oster and her prenatal (Expecting Better) and postpartum (Cribsheet) books are great resources, but they hardly prepare you for parenting. Those books can help you make some macro decisions for sure, but overall parenting is an experience which will likely be the most mentally challenging thing you've done, barring any exceedingly traumatizing events.
- It’ll be fine, don’t stress every detail
- Take care of yourself
- Get enough sleep
- Get enough sleep
- Get enough sleep
They are a few weeks long, e.g. an evening a week. They cover the basics you mentioned, including practical stuff for the parents and the baby around pregnancy, birth and infancy. Being part of a cohort was valuable for discussing and socialising the ideas, and it was far more valuable to me than e.g. reading from a book. They were also a great support group in those early days.
Having a baby is like stepping onto a speeding escalator with no end in sight. It's amazing but incredibly draining. You can't be prepared for that, but getting habituated to the idea is useful, I think.
And if there was something you wanted to do or experience (movie, holiday, etc), do it before the baby comes.
And finally, you can't cuddle a baby too much. Give it as much love and attention as you can possibly spare.
[0] https://www.nct.org.uk/courses-workshops/nct-antenatal-cours...