In spite of the six thousand manuals on child raising in the bookstores, child raising is still a dark continent and no one really knows anything. You just need a lot of love and luck - and, of course, courage.
The first question we usually ask new parents is : “Is it a boy or a girl ?”. There is a great answer to that one going around : “We don’t know ; it hasn’t told us yet.” Personally, I think no question containing “either/or” deserves a serious answer, and that includes the question of gender.
As one does with a first child, I found out that my baby could roll by hearing the sound of her body hit the ground at 4 a.m. and obviously, for any new parent, that is the most horrifying thing that could happen, right? You're exhausted and you take your tiny little baby out and you put them on the bed to change diapers before nursing and you turn around and you discover... my baby can roll! And you think you're going to die.
New parents always sound like hucksters in a pyramid scheme. Anyone who has kids and then gets you to go and have kids gets a check from Huckster Headquarters.
Your top job as a new parent is to love your baby like crazy. After showering her with affection, your next two important jobs are to feed her and to calm her when she cries.
The best advice I can give to new parents is to realize immediately that your children will be unique individuals. Give them the space to be themselves and to develop their own personalities and characteristics.
There is growing consensus that new parents need help--information, advice, practical assistance--and that infants and toddlers need stimulation as well as care and nurture.
Navajo infants get so attached to cradleboard that they cry to be tied into it. Kikuyu infants in Kenya get handed around several"mothers," all wives to one man. . . . Mothers in rural Guatemala keep their infants quiet, in dark huts. Middle-class American mothers talk a blue streak at them. Israeli kibbutz mothers give them over to a communal caretaker . . . Japanese mothers sleep with them. . . . All these tactics are compatible with normal health--physical and mental--and development in infancy. So one lesson for parents so far seems to be: Let a hundred flowers bloom.
I think that parents ought to get some idea of how the so- called "experts" have changed their advice over the decades, so that they won't take them deadly seriously, and so that if the parent has the strong feeling, "I don't like this advice," the parent won't feel compelled to follow it. . . . So don't worry about trying to do a perfect job. There is no perfect job. There is no one way of raising your children.
We tend to think of divorced or complicated families as a modern invention, and that is not at all true. You only have to read the Greek myths to see broken homes, widows, divorce, stepchildren, children trying to get along with new parents.
However pragmatic you are, it is very demanding being a new parent.
Does any new parent, even if you're not a first-time parent, ever really know what to do?
As any new parent knows, you're only too happy to show off your new child and, you know, proclaim that he is the best looking or the best everything.
What every new parent needs.a ton of expert advice, presented with humor and zero negativity, from two moms who instantly feel like your best friends. This is the one pregnancy guide that new parents will actually want to read.
I think the last few weeks for me have been just a very different emotional experience. Something I never thought I would feel myself. And I find...a lot of things affect me differently now. As any new parent knows, you're only too happy to show off your new child and, you know, proclaim that he is the best looking or the best everything.
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