Michael Khoo shares helpful and funny tips for new dads to enjoy the ride of fatherhood.
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Having a kid may seem a little scary. People have certainly built a large and profitable industry around it and it sometimes may feel like you’re not naturally going to figure it out. But trust me and every other dad that came before us, you will. You’ll also not drop the baby (dads’ most common fear), and will love it more than you can imagine. Past that, as my friend Laurent said, “it’s not that hard, just listen to what they want”.
Below are ten categories of things to think about before your new one arrives.
1. Sleep: Sleep is everything. For all of you.
You have no idea how quickly you can go crazy when a baby doesn’t stop crying and no one is sleeping. The Happiest Baby on the Block DVD teaches you how to calm a newborn and gave me my first empowering moments as a father, while still at the hospital. The author is a genius and it will take care of you for the first three months. Plus it teaches you to wrap them like a burrito, which is a great party trick. (Note, you can take them anywhere at the beginning because once they’re down, they’re down.)
Our birthing class instructor thankfully told us, “There is no shame in one of you sometimes sleeping in the other room. There is no point in everyone being sleep deprived.” I did it once a week, just so that I could function at work. For sure I felt a little guilty but that leads to…
Get the baby comfortable with the bottle early so that you can share the midnight feeding duties. It’s super tiring for moms to never get more than three hours in a row so this can give her a life-changing 6 straight hours of sleep. And then, I promise, you will be happier too.
Another book, for post-3 months, is Healthy Sleep Habits, Healthy Families. It is also brilliant and doesn’t do the hard core cry-it-out-for-two-hours method, though it is firm. My friend Lida’s husband Scott gave me the more important advice, he said “there are so many different books and techniques, the most important thing is to pick one and stick with it.” Babies are conniving and will sense weakness in a divided strategy.
Co-sleeping. We had Dax co-sleep in our bed until 5 months and it was hard. No one got much of anything, so to speak. I pushed to get him in the crib earlier to no avail. But one night he woke up seven times and the next morning my wife Anastasia evicted him in a fit of exhaustion. In one day we kicked him out of the bed, kicked the crib out of our bedroom and started feeding him solid food. We thought he’d never be happy again. But in a few days, he was sleeping through the night and was going to bed in less than 10 mins. HE, was happier. We, in turn, began doing novel things like talking out loud after 7 pm.
My friend Jerry added, be loud. Don’t tiptoe around when the baby goes down or you’ll do that forever. They will learn to sleep through whatever norm is set.
2. Food: Food, unsurprisingly, is also everything.
Our excellent pediatrician Dr. Razi says that babies bodies know how to get what they need from what they’re given. It’s amazing how some kids, the same size, eat half of what others do. Anastasia is quite concerned with managing Dax’s food but I’m a bit more lassiez-faire. If they are good eaters, let them gorge. If they want 20 crackers or 10 pieces of bacon, go nuts. There are bunch of easy ways to make sure they get balanced nutrients (putting greens into mashed potatoes or apple juice etc).
Speaking of taste, Anastasia got a cookbook for babies that had an amazing idea I’d never heard: taste everything you feed your child. If you don’t like it, why would they? Most baby food tastes like cardboard. If I were French, I’d say it’s insulting their developing palate.
If they have eating troubles, figure it out with your doctor as soon as you can. My friend Timi didn’t discover that her baby had serious acid reflux till 6 months in and the baby cried for 12 hours a day.
Also, some people are very anti-formula but I think science has got this one pretty well covered. Some of those concerns are what people might call “first world problems”. No question mama’s milk is better but if that’s not possible or you sub out from time to time, the baby will still grow up and tell you he doesn’t want to do his homework.
3. Communications
65% of all communication between adults is nonverbal so you can imagine how this works out for a baby. You think they don’t understand, and they look at you like you’re a fool. As our pediatrician says, with Obi-Wan-like gravitas, “Babies know everything. Everything”. They feel everything you feel by watching and listening. So, if you’re happy, calm, or scared about something, it’s likely the baby will be too. Watch what happens the first time mom and dad have an argument in front of him! This leads to…
4. Co-parenting
There are a thousand books on raising a baby but I’ve never seen one on co-parenting. Too bad; it’s the much more complex challenge. Your differing personalities and styles play out in most parenting decisions. We bring the histories of how we were raised–for better and worse–and our selective memories of our upbringings to the table. It can play out over changing a diaper, the color of the shoes, they books you read, TV…the opportunities for disagreement are limitless.
In an article I read about the longest married couple in the US, they were asked the secrets to their success. She said, “separate bathrooms”. He said it was the phrase “Yes, Dear”. I’m assuming you can’t afford a second bathroom.
Be prepared that some babies have an entirely different relationship with each of you. He may be calm with dad and needy with mom, as is my case. Or fighting with dad and soft with mom. My friend Brian and I have exact opposite experiences with this. Many parents say this changes as they go through stages but our son has been pretty consistent.
Temporarily reduce expectations for your relationship. It will all return and grow deeper. And I’m not just saying that because my wife will read this. One thing that helps ease co-parenting challenges is…
5. Time management
In general, I am a fan of divide and conquer. Time becomes so much more precious that I often felt guilty doing anything non-essential. So we started splitting up the weekend days up so that each of us could have an entire morning to sleep in, and an afternoon to do anything we wanted. It was magic. A 50/50 split on weekends makes both of you so much more normal. I still do frivolous things like playing in a band. She gets to do her nails and go to the gym.
6. Friends & networks
You share deep things with near strangers when you talk about your kids with other new parents. I met a few new dads when Dax was born and found it super helpful to hang out with people going through the same stages. Take you babies to the Zoo together, but more importantly, go out for beer and nachos when they’re down.
7. Safety
It’s easy to stress yourself out about safety. I feel that pressure but also think that all the devices on the market to “protect” the baby can limit the beauty of parenting. To be sure, babyproofing the knife drawer is easy stuff you should do. Also, some surprising things like vitamins can carry lethal doses for a baby so rearranging lower shelves gets you through the first year. But babies are resilient and their instincts and biology were designed to protect them.
We bought this morbid heart monitor for under our baby’s crib that would go off if his heart stopped. Trouble was, when you lifted him out and forgot to turn it off, as often happens at 3 am, it went off. FYI, babies don’t like the sound of alarms at 3 am. Overall, it just caused anxiety and would only really inform you of something terrible after the fact.
I wouldn’t recommend trying this deliberately but, as an example of resilience, babies can eat raw animals. One time when Dax was about 10 months old, I was preparing dinner with him on the floor. He got a little quiet and I looked down to find him happily chewing on a piece of raw of chicken that dropped off the counter. I freaked out, poured water all over his mouth to purge it and called poison control. They said that it would likely be fine (it was), and just to watch for anything unusual. The only one needing trauma treatment was me.
Also, Anastasia might kill me for saying this but our pediatrician said that standard electrical sockets don’t give a lethal dose, they just deter them from ever playing with them again. This naturally leads to…
8. Helicopter parenting
Everyone I know says they’re against so-called “helicopter parenting” so it’s strange how it can simultaneously be so ubiquitous. I read a book by John Holt in high school that I’ve kept at the back of my mind through these two years, called How Children Fail. It had the idea that instead of showing children how to use a toy, you should just drop it in the middle of the room, let them figure it out. They will come to you if they need help but most often they don’t. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with them using a toy train as a drum mallet and that philosophy that can run through everything you do with them.
One of the few books I’ve managed to finish, and loved, was Bringing Up Bebe. It compares French and US childrearing techniques has a philosophy that is disciplined but very empowering for children. It has convincing chapter titles like, “French children don’t throw food”, “The perfect mother doesn’t exist”, and “Let him live his life”.
The other book I love is the Whole Brain Child. It uses modern neuroscience to show you what you child is and isn’t capable of understanding, and has great techniques to integrate their left and right and “upstairs and downstairs” brains. They have a great line about how the hardest parenting moments are actually the moments with the most potential for depth and happiness, if you understand them right. I admit to not having finished it yet but I’m coasting on a very good first half and the cheat sheet in the back.
9. Music
Music was a savior for me and I think, helped soothe him. If nothing else, it helps with the routines and cues. I had a small set of songs I’d repeat over and over. I sang him The Water is Wide (James Taylor and Karla Bonhoff version) almost every single night. Now, if he wakes up, I can stick my head in the door, hum the tune and he’ll go right back to sleep. I feel like I have Jedi powers.
10. Final random thoughts
You will have far less time than you’ve ever had but there’s one reason to be thankful: now you can’t think about all the other stressful things in your life. Being present with your kid, in a hyper distracted world, is very soothing.
Boys, if you have one, love wrestling and laugh hardest when being physical.
When your baby learns to talk at 12-18 months, it will learn to pick up words when you least expect it. Like recently when some car cut me off and I honked and swore. Now, every time Dax hears a horn in the distance, he quietly says the F word. Yesterday, someone else honked at a bus, he said “fuck, bus”. We try desperately to stifle laughter and change the subject.
Go outside. Our amazing pediatrician said that right from the beginning, you should take the baby out three times a day. We were more on the one to two end, but I think it’s important for everyone’s mental health to get out into the fresh air. Also, that lets the other partner sleep.
I finished therapy when Anastasia was pregnant and my therapist Bob gave me a great parting comment, “Remember, his pain will not be your pain”. I will likely begin to understand that when Dax is a teen.
All of this above and everything else you figure out will not apply from time to time. Just when you think you’ve mastered something, they go through a growth spurt and it throws everything off.
When it gets really hard, just remember billions of people did this before you so you really can’t screw it up that bad.
There’s a scene in the West Wing where Toby is nervously about to become a father and says “What If I don’t love them”, fearing he’ll be a bad and distant father. Rest assured, this will make you love someone more than you ever have before. It will make you give to another in a way that makes you want to keep on giving forever. Which is pretty strange for most of us.
Enjoy the ride and don’t freak out when the baby falls off the changing table.
Photo: Iamagenious/Flickr