My wife, Elaina, loves babies. She loves to have them, to hold them, to nurse and to stroll them. She knows everything there is to know about kids, it seems to me, including the best brands of strollers, baby wraps and baby and kid fashion, as well as a number of other topics about which I remain blissfully ignorant.
She may even love changing diapers, or at least has no real issue with doing 85 percent of that task over the past six or so years. I know, I know. Bad dad! It’s just that she’s so much better at it than I am.
I don’t have the visceral yearning for birth and babies that seems to be in my wife’s DNA. She loves babies so much that in the past 18 months or so she’s created a little cottage industry as a birth, baby and family photographer. And she’s really good.
Still, even I’ve learned a lot about kids in the past few years, or at least I’ve become much more open-minded, thanks to Otis, Rosey and Mabel – and of course their mother. Here’s a list of things I now believe to be true about babies:
You don’t need all that stuff they say you do. While I support the baby shower industry and realize new parents need items to put on their registry, after taking three little humans through the first year of life we realized we could do without some of the “musts” on most lists. The first to go was a changing table. We used our big, heavy wooden one for the first kid, but ditched it before No. 2. Now, we change our third baby anywhere and everywhere.
Your house will become cluttered with stuff, nonetheless. We swore our slightly minimal, monochromatic home wouldn’t become a repository for colorful plastic toys, dolls and such. But of course it has. And I don’t really care.
Wear your baby. Colorful wraps and other forms of carrying babies are fine by me now, even if they seemed a bit … Euro-hippie to me before.
Feed your baby proudly in public, be it with bottles, breasts or whatever you choose. My wife is part of the “normalize” movement, and doesn’t feel the need to use a cover as she breast-feeds. I’ll admit to being a tad … protective, I guess, even uncomfortable about that at first. Now I’m protective when I see a mom exercising her rights in this regard. Just back off, I say to the breast-feeding-phobic out there. If you don’t like it, don’t look.
Talk and read to them constantly. I think everyone knows this one, but it’s sort of amazing how often we observe families sitting silently at restaurants, staring at screens.
Having your child slumber on your chest for a few hours each morning is something no man should miss. My dad duties since day one included taking our child out of the bedroom after an early-morning feeding so my wife could get a few hours of sleep. In return, she encouraged me to sleep through the night, as she took charge of middle-of-the-night feeding, changing and nurturing. My 4-6 a.m. shifts, alone with our tiny child, snoozing skin-to-skin on my chest as the rest of the house slept, make the highlight reel of my life. And I got to do it three times.
Praise the effort, not the innate. It’s so easy to say, “you’re so smart, you’re so cute, you’re so nice” from birth. But all the research says we’re doing our kids a disservice if we don’t teach them to take on challenges, instead of settling for what comes easily and naturally.
If you do social media, be careful about the level of perfection you try to portray. It can look a lot like privilege. Earlier this year we saw a post asking for positive thoughts and prayers because of a hard time the woman’s family was going through: A home design project had gone wrong, and now they had to live with the results. Another complained about how they were forced into a three-bedroom luxury apartment while their upscale home was being remodeled.
On the other hand, there is a marvelously empathetic, supportive and passionate tribe of parents on social media. They’re willing to share pain and progress in their parenting, along with all the pics of cute kids.
Midwives are amazing. Home births in baby pools aren’t as odd as I once thought (though I don’t think I’d be up for the experience) and natural birth is pretty darn cool, too. You couldn’t have convinced me of any of this circa 2010. But what the heck did I know? I wasn’t a dad.
Contact the writer: kfrancis@scng.com
