Parents - Do you have any advice for Employee 1.1 who just became a first-time Dad?

POTO,

Traditional as in the past. Your description of child rearing is an entirely recent phenomena, although the numbers support your view. The resulting benefits to modern society certainly in question. My wife had a degree and career as an elementary and special education teacher. We traded keeping up with the Jones' for a sane family life. Our children were the beneficiaries.

If you or others chose a different direction that is your choice. It wasn't ours.

Igy

Make America Nice Again wrote:

Sleep deprivation is the worst thing about having a baby.

Step 1: Treat the baby like a relay baton and hand it off to the other parent a few nights per week so at least one parent can get a full night of sleep. This is easier if Mom pumps breast milk and you can feed from a bottle at night.

Step 2: After a few months move the baby to a crib in its own room. Let baby cry itself to sleep. Use a baby monitor. For the first 6 months baby will have to be fed at intervals overnight.

Step 3: Profit. Oh, wait... that's underpants gnomes. Kids are an expense forever, but we love them anyway.

Pumping is a huge time suck in this scenario. When the baby is a newborn, they feed so often that pumping would mean the next time the baby is hungry, mom won't have any milk available. Then the next time Mom would be feeding, baby won't be hungry and it turns into a cycle where dad is playing with the baby while mom is pumping while neither gets a rest.

Breastfeeding is wonderful and feeding formula is wonderful. Pumping because you have to work can be necessarily to continue breastfeeding, but if you are just feeding expressed milk all the time, it gets exhausting for everyone.

Get Off My Lawn wrote:

But you're arguing against common sense? Only the know it alls under 40 are that arrogant. One kid, huh? And now you've got the answers.

I never said I had all the answers. Every kid is different. It takes time and effort to discover that kid. God forbid I be left alone with my "common sense" to raise my kid.

Since there is no training required to be a parent, chances are excellent, plenty of kids are getting screwed up along the way with parents using "common sense."

wrong, wrong, wrong. Pumping in between feeds is an excellent way of increasing mother's milk supply. Think of it in terms of baby's demand fuels supply. The only problem with this scenario is the possibility of the mother becoming engorged and setting herself at risk of mastitis in the event she is unable to keep up with the pumping/feeding schedule. Mastitis is more of a nuisance than a risk. Breast milk is much more nutritious than any formula and the mother also greatly benefits from breastfeeding. It's much better to refrigerate breast milk than freeze it, so as to preserve the antibodies and other factors, Happy pumping!

But I will say & apologize in advance, be THE best parent for your kid, no matter what...really. It's about you & your existence in your next life...💋

maxxximus wrote:

wrong, wrong, wrong. Pumping in between feeds is an excellent way of increasing mother's milk supply. Think of it in terms of baby's demand fuels supply. The only problem with this scenario is the possibility of the mother becoming engorged and setting herself at risk of mastitis in the event she is unable to keep up with the pumping/feeding schedule. Mastitis is more of a nuisance than a risk. Breast milk is much more nutritious than any formula and the mother also greatly benefits from breastfeeding. It's much better to refrigerate breast milk than freeze it, so as to preserve the antibodies and other factors, Happy pumping!

We aren't talking about the same thing. The suggestion I was trying to refute was for the breastfeeding mom to skip feedings while dad feeds milk. In that case the mom had to do pumping that takes just as much time as the dad feeding. I wasn't saying that pumping in between feedings was dumb.

Bring Back the 880 wrote:

We aren't talking about the same thing. The suggestion I was trying to refute was for the breastfeeding mom to skip feedings while dad feeds milk.

Good grief. My original point is let Dad feed the baby when Mom is sleeping through the night or is unavailable.

Make America Nice Again wrote:

Bring Back the 880 wrote:

We aren't talking about the same thing. The suggestion I was trying to refute was for the breastfeeding mom to skip feedings while dad feeds milk.

Good grief. My original point is let Dad feed the baby when Mom is sleeping through the night or is unavailable.

Not my fault it is possibly bad advice for brand new parents, even if it is good advice later on (though if you're lucky, baby might sleep through the night soon enough it won't matter).

Of course, depending on choices they make feeding-wise it might be good advice from the start. It really depends. Mentioning pumping probably made your post too specific.

Bring Back the 880 wrote:

Make America Nice Again wrote:

Good grief. My original point is let Dad feed the baby when Mom is sleeping through the night or is unavailable.

Not my fault it is possibly bad advice for brand new parents, even if it is good advice later on (though if you're lucky, baby might sleep through the night soon enough it won't matter).

Of course, depending on choices they make feeding-wise it might be good advice from the start. It really depends. Mentioning pumping probably made your post too specific.

Breast milk is best for the baby. How do you propose feeding the baby if the mother is not there (doctor or dentist appointment, evening with girlfriends for sanity break, etc).

Do you think new mothers must be chained to the infant? All experts recommend pumping breast milk so the father or other caretakers can feed the baby.

Nothing of what I said contradicts your points. The suggestion I didn't agree with was to alternate nights of feedings.

From personal experience, the mom usually takes more time off when the baby is born and baby needs to feed a lot those first few weeks. If the dad is going back to work, how can he be up all night, then work all day? Better for a breastfeeding mom to do night feedings since she will get chances to nap during the day.

I know some people try to do everything equal, but breastfeeding precludes this to some extent. When both spouses go back to work and baby is sleeping longer stretches.

Alternating night feedings might be a good idea after the kid is fed by bottle, but why should dad wake up to feed baby when mom needs to get up to pump at that same time anyway?

If we are just taking about giving the mom a night or a day off, that is great, but we don't need both parents up at night every night.

Get Off My Lawn wrote:

When Americans started reading Dr. Spock, that's when the societal decay really began to roll. The soft snowflakes of today are the result. Indulgent parenting can go too far, and it's gone way too far by now.

Your name is perfect. You sound like the crankiest old man ever. Every generation has said the same thing and its nice to see you doing it too.

In my incredible statistical sample of my childrens friends, I would have to say they are by far better people than my cohorts & I were at their age.

truckdriver wrote:

Get Off My Lawn wrote:

When Americans started reading Dr. Spock, that's when the societal decay really began to roll. The soft snowflakes of today are the result. Indulgent parenting can go too far, and it's gone way too far by now.

Your name is perfect. You sound like the crankiest old man ever. Every generation has said the same thing and its nice to see you doing it too.

In my incredible statistical sample of my childrens friends, I would have to say they are by far better people than my cohorts & I were at their age.

Very clever my friend. So that you might fool the letsrun core audience you use "truckdriver" as your handle to misrepresent yourself as a working class common-sense man of the masses. I say you are an imposter!

I'm calling you out as an educated liberal for these reasons:

- you know the difference between "they're", "there" and "their"

- you use 4-syllable words such as "incredible" and "statistical"

- you obviously went to a liberal arts college where "cohort" "is used in every other sentence (a normal person would rather have a stick poked in their eye than use a word like "cohort")

- you cleverly left off an apostrophe in"childrens" to make it seem you are uneducated; unfortunately the word "friends" which follows is spelled correctly, and we all know truck drivers and rojo spell it "frends" or "freinds"

Conclusion: Don't trust posts by truckdriver

Demand a 50% pay raise from the Brothers' Johnson.

liberal alert wrote:

Very clever my friend. So that you might fool the letsrun core audience you use "truckdriver" as your handle to misrepresent yourself as a working class common-sense man of the masses. I say you are an imposter!

When the facts work against you, it's down to name calling. Good job America.