When I speak to friends who don’t have children yet, they often ask if I have any advice on being a parent. Being only a few years into the experience, I don’t know how any of our decisions will pan out into teenage years or beyond. However, the question isn’t usually about that: usually the subtext of the question is:
“How did you survive with a newborn and figure it all out?”
or
“Tell me something really hard about being a parent.”
That being said, I have thought a lot about how to answer that question, and it has come down to two pieces of advice about having a baby.
A note about advice
The funny part about coming up with general purpose advice is that, by its nature, it’s probably banal and useless.
We often seek out advice from parents, family, friends, or other people who know us well. For example, if there’s a house project, I often will talk to my dad or my father-in-law. They’re both very handy, but they’re not Bob Vila. So why would I go to them instead of a plumber?
Well, there are lots of reasons, but an important one is that they know my general situation, they know me, and they will spend time figuring out what’s going on. Overall, good advice not only requires expertise but also deep context on the person soliciting advice to be useful.
So when it comes to parenting advice, most advice is really that it depends. I can speak with hindsight on what I would have done differently with my children at one month old, but that’s different from anyone else’s advice. When I should have leaned in, another parent should create space. When I should have focused more on my child, another parent should remember to prioritize self-care. It’s quite situational.
But I did promise two bits of advice, which I think are the two most generally applicable things I could come up with.
Have a plan for sleep
My first disclaimer is that every child is different, and that is absolutely true for how they (and consequently, you) will sleep. You can’t control how your child will sleep, but you can shape their sleep significantly.
A lot of parenting is just winging it, and most things will be fine. With sleep, however, I suspect that most people’s intuitions on managing infant sleep is wrong. Your baby and you will sleep better with some solid grounding in time-tested, scientifically-backed, practical sleep techniques.
Maybe you already know what this is having been around babies before. If it’s enough that you know what to do, you’re set. If you don’t know what to expect, learn from somewhere.
If you need a specific resource, we read and had great success with Precious Little Sleep. That’s certainly not the only path to success, but whatever you figure out, you and your child will be better off for it.
Find a community for support
When our children were born, we benefitted greatly from having grandparents around to help. Newborns are just a lot, and the extra hands make a huge difference.
And yet, we didn’t have a lot of built-in support around us. Our family doesn’t normally live in the area, and when we had our first child, our close friends didn’t have children yet. Also it was peak pandemic, so not a lot of anything was going on.
They always say it takes a village. Without a community, being a parent can feel tough, lonely, and confusing. However, having supportive people around to lend a hand, compare notes, commiserate, or distract can be a huge help.
For me, the best community we found is around our daycare. By nature, the other families are by-and-large like-minded people in similar situations. We chat in our parents WhatsApp group, plan playdates, share ideas, and whatnot.
Final thoughts
Are those two pieces of advice actually useful? I can’t know. However, I’m quite confident that those are broadly true even if they were obvious.
I heard an interesting take that the concept of parenting as an activity is actually quite new. Of course, humans have been parents for as long as history, but the idea of needing to learn and figure it out originated sometime in the latter half of the 20th century.
The story goes that before that, parenting was just part of life. Expecting parents likely had lots of experience with new families and such growing up, so they roughly knew what to expect and just did that.
However, sometime in the 20th century, the combination of isolating nuclear families (spurred on by suburban development and whatnot) left new parents without much experience. And with the development of modern schooling, the obvious resource became books, which spurred on the entire industry of parenting advice and parenting experts.
But a book doesn’t know you. A parenting expert on social media probably doesn’t know you. And certainly some guy writing a blog isn’t any better.
So take my advice and find some better advice.