List of Topics
What feels like aggressively gendered language that excludes dads in nearly 100% of blogs, articles, guides, websites, etc. aimed at informing parents about all aspects of pregnancy and caring for infants/children. It’s ALWAYS, “As the mama, you get to decide.” Even for someone quite very confident and happy to ignore these micro-jabs, it feels like subtle discouragement, like, “this is really something the mom should be reading, not you.” While that’s not the intent, that’s the impact. I understand the intention to empower moms, to help make the transition to thinking of themselves as a mom (if it’s their first), and that’s great. But it’s possible to do this in a way that doesn’t alienate dads…and it’s clearly no one’s intention to alienate dads. But it’s the collective impact of nearly 100% of resources for parents being framed in this way, and there’s no study that could verify or negate the effect of this on a nation (or world) of dads, but it seems hard to make the argument that this has zero effect on dads sense of empowerment/disempowerment to engage in researching what’s best for their baby, engaging in online communities, and so on.
On an irony of our generation giving parenting advice ...and... On preparation for pregnancy/raising a baby
The previous generation's style was to give unsolicited advice on pregnancy/parenting, which bothers our generation to no end.
Ironically, our generation does the same thing, we just frame it differently. It used to be that people would actually give expecting parents unsolicited advice constantly, and more heavily skewed towards women than men. So it's even more ironic (but also tracks with how "meta" our generation is) that the modern day version of this phenomenon is people saying that "everyone will give you unsolicited advice, but just ignore all that. You'll read all the books like everyone does, but ultimately every baby is different and you can't predict what will work and won't work for your baby." The reason that this is the height of irony is that actually NO ONE has given us unsolicited advice in the way these people say, but almost EVERYONE has said something to the effect of this quote...and what they're essentially doing in the second half of this quote IS giving their own unsolicited advice: namely that you can't prepare while condescendingly implying that "you'll see when you're as wise as I am now."
I've found that once I ask for their advice or to hear how they've approached things like baby sleep etc., even though they *said* they "read all the books" it's very clear that they actually did NOT read all the books, but probably read parts of 2-3 books, then left them alone. This has become clear over and over again, when I probe a bit more about what they didn't know before, that they learned later through experience, and they start sharing specific things that are pervasive in the best books. The issue then seems to be that they didn't actually adequately prepare, but want to be percevied by others as if they did. It's unfair to blame people for this, because the vast majority of people are not obsessive about optimizing any part of their life, and given how incredibly complex the world of pregnancy/baby care is, they would need very well-developed capabilities in planning systems and risk assessment in order to optimally prepare for baby care. ("Optimal preparation", meaning the preparation that creates the lowest probability of negative outcome, and the highest probability that prepared knowledge/materials adequately address unanticipated challenges).
It is clear form these conversations that the best approach for optimal baby preparation is to thoroughly document all of the learnings gathered throughout our preparation into a reference document, which can then be easily referred to when issues become relevant. The aim is to create a resource of carefully researched recommendations across a broad range of baby topics (sleep, nutrition, etc.) to replace what most new parents use google for: looking for advice during situations that are beyond the immediate capabilities of the parent to deal with.On preparing for breastfeeding: After having taken the lactation class at rose and having a 2 hours session with a lactation consultant, it seems completely absurd that it is not standard to do pre-education with parents about how to breastfeed, with a plan (plan a, b, c) for the first several weeks.
Recovery from delivery
On the idea that "people have been giving birth for millions of years, so you don't need to go to classes on things related to labor, delivery, and raising a baby": This idea is intellectually lazy and misguided. It ignores the fact that for that time, the societies were set up to fundamentally provide community care for babies and children.
On being a new parent/stay at home parent being the hardest job in the world: I get why people roll their eyes at this, and it has always struck me as a bit of a, “yeah, seems extremely hard, but there have to be harder jobs”. My sense as to what’s going on with the statement is that it is both true and not true. Easier to see by chunking out the job.
The actual tasks involved: initially 6/10 challenging, then 2-3/10 once you learn skills of feeding, changing, swaddling, calming, etc.
The working conditions: 10/10 challenging. There are basically zero jobs that require you to wake up and work for 45-60 minutes every 2 hours, 24 hours a day for months straight with zero weekends or evenings off. This alone makes it the hardest job in the world in one specific sense. And to clarify, babies need to eat ever 2-3 hours (at 7 days old, we’re currently doing every 2 hours during the day and every 3 hours overnight). But this doesn’t mean we get 2-3 hours of sleep at a time. You time this from the start of one feeding to the start of the next, and our current routine of (1) change diaper, (2) breastfeed, (3) donor milk supplement bottle feeding, (4) pump, (5) change diaper and put down again takes up to an hour. This leaves probably 45 minutes to actually sleep between feeds when you factor in all the little interstitial tasks (slowly pulling yourself out of bed, going to the bathroom, un-swaddling to change, re-swaddling, etc.)
