(Your child does come with directions.)

1. Your life will never be the same.
2. It’s a lifetime commitment, you’ve made a commitment forever.

I remember when my first 19 year old was going through some very challenging times.  She was making lifelong decisions.  I was right in there with her, sometimes joyful, sometimes sad.  I was making the mistake of projecting my own childhood onto her (What can I say? She was my first 19 year old.)  Trust me your child’s childhood is vastly different than yours, if for no other reason than because most people resist their own childhood.  Oh yes, we do repeat patterns, but if we are smart, we outgrow those patterns…  Anyway, she wanted to pass up a $500.00 cheerleading scholarship so that she could move in with her beloved, I was incredibly angry with her.  My past included an intense yearning for the opportunity to go to college.  I couldn’t believe that anyone would pass up the chance.  I discouraged her from following her heart, and encouraged her to go to school.  I mean I would probably make the same mistake today, but for different reasons.  Anyway, it was a mistake, it led to a rift between us, which I regretted.  After the challenge passed, I remember reflecting on the fact that they (the children) weren’t going to grow up and go away.  I would laugh and cry to their music for my whole lifetime.

  Whatever your circumstance, whatever life path you have chosen, nothing will ever be the same again.  Having a baby is the single most important decision you will ever make.  The hardest job you will ever have is about to commence.

  You will, initially and certainly, sleep less, you will lose track of your diet, your schedule and your peace of mind.  You will be spit on, spit at, embarrassed, humiliated, exhausted and happy and sometimes all at the same time.  If you are lucky, you will shamelessly fall in love.  That love will strengthen and weaken you.  A friend of mine once told me that pre-baby his anal self could not stand body fluids.  Post-baby, my friend became enthralled with his son’s bowel movements.  Why? because they were an indicator of his son’s health.  My friend, more than anything, wanted his son to be healthy.  That meant appreciating it all.

Bringing Your Newborn Home

  Your baby should be brought home to your environment, your structure, your life.  You want your baby to learn to fit in and to be a part of what is already there.  If you like music, make it a part of your baby’s home life.  If you have pets, keep your routine with your pets.  If you have a boisterous home, keep it so.  If you have a calm and quiet home, keep it so.

  That said, yes there is much moderation that your home, schedule and life will need to accomplish.  An infant needs a clean and safe environment.  An infant needs an environment capable of responding to infantile needs.  Eric Erickson designates this first critical stage as trust / vs. mistrust.  Translated into people language, it is quite a simple concept.  An infant learns to feel secure in an environment where needs are responded to and where hunger and cold are non-existent, or minimal.  An infant in an environment that is unreliable will learn distrust.  If on one day, the infant feels warm and full, and the next day the infant is scared cold and hungry, the infant will be insecure.  Until the infant can learn trust, the infant cannot move on to the next developmental stage.  So while we must attend to practical things like t-shirts and washers & dryers, it is far more important that the emotional environment be stable, comforting and positive for the infant.

Now it’s time for the more mundane side of parenting your newborn.  There is a lot about parenting that is mundane.  There will be times when your only function is to guard your child’s environment and that can get pretty boring.  It is what it is…

Diet

Breastfeeding:

It is a long and treasured tradition in my family to breastfeed.  The least amount of time we normally breast feed is six weeks to two months, and can go for as long as six months.  There are many benefits to breastfeeding: the number one benefit being that the mother passes on all of her disease immunities to her infant via the breast milk.  There is the ease of feeding, no bottles, no sterilizing, no formula purchase, all of these benefits help to encourage mothers to breastfeed.  It is great to breastfeed unless you can’t.  There are many reasons why a mother cannot or should not breastfeed.  If a mother tries to breastfeed anyway, it can be very painful for her and very upsetting for the baby.  Sometimes mothers will feel inadequate or upset if they cannot breastfeed.  Breastfeeding is not for everyone.  If you cannot or should not, don’t and don’t feel bad about it.  My stepdaughter agonized through weeks of painful breastfeeding before she allowed herself to give it up.  It is okay if you cannot breastfeed.

If you decide to breastfeed it can be one of the many rewarding experiences of parenting.  You should get direction and guidance from the Le Leche group and other mothers who have been successful.  It is possible to breastfeed adopted infants, I was able to do this even though my youngest birth child was four years old at the time of the adoption.

On Feeding:

An infant may or may not have allergies and there is only one way to tell.  Every time you introduce a food, do it singly (as in one ingredient, oatmeal is just oats) and try it for three days before moving on to the next single food.  The first thing you want to introduce your infant to is sugar water, this will keep your infant hydrated and bowel movements regular.  Sugar water is made with clear syrup and water, 1 teaspoon per 2 ounces of water is enough to start out with.  In addition to water, your infant will need only breast milk or formula for the first 4 to 5 weeks of life.  (Advice from 1973) Over the years recommendations about feeding have changed dramatically.  When I gave birth the first time in 1973 we were told not to breastfeed for the first 24 hours, at other times and in other cultures, infants can be breast fed immediately upon birth.  There really is no dire reason to do it either way, just as with many parenting questions, many answers are correct.

As mentioned before, it is good to wait three days between each newly introduced food.  This waiting period allows you to evaluate your child’s reaction to each new food.  It is important to feed your infant a single ingredient food.  For example, begin with rice cereal and read the label!  So many products have a plethora of ingredients, yet many baby products have single ingredients.  Mix your rice cereal with water and sugar syrup.  You can start out with a small spoon, but I do not recommend it.  For the first feedings, use a cereal nipple and feed from a bottle.  It is very important that you do not prop the bottle, but that you hold your infant when feeding.  My babies could not hold their own bottles until they were 3 1/2 to 4 months old.  Once in a while, I might prop the bottle, but only if the baby was in full view, so that I could monitor the baby’s feeding.  When buying baby food always look at the label to confirm single ingredient contents.  Baby applesauce will normally be apples and water, baby chocolate pudding is going to have numerous complex ingredients and therefore should be saved until your infant is at least 4 months old.  It will take several weeks to introduce your infant to a broad array of foods.  Begin using a spoon when you and your child are comfortable with it. 

I began feeding my babies cereal for the last meal of the day when they were 5 to 6 weeks old.  This would help fill up their little bellies and make them sleep for longer periods in the night.  If your baby is waking every couple of hours when she is 5 weeks old, this means that she needs more filling food.

Digestion:

Diaper changing will be a fact of life for some time to come.  Your infant should have at least one bowel movement per day.  Initially, there will be many more.  My advice is to put diapers everywhere!  Put a diaper in the glove compartment, put a diaper in your purse, put a diaper upstairs and downstairs, in the kitchen and in the bedroom.  Yes, you will bring a diaper bag everywhere with you, just don’t get caught out without one.  Enough about diapers, now we move on to causing digestion.

Believe it or not, I used fruit juice to hydrate my 3 year old.  The reason that this is a “believe it or not” is that fruit juice can cause diarrhea.  Diarrhea causes dehydration. I was actually making my daughter sick, thank goodness for well meaning neighbors, who stuck their nose in and advised me on proper hydration.  If your baby has diarrhea, give your baby clear fluids (not apple juice!).  Clear fluids include Pedialyte, Gatorade, sugar water, Sprite and 7-Up.

Sleeping

A calm environment will help your infant rest well.  You need a confined sleeping space for your infant – sleeping with you through the night should not be an option.  In this, as in all things with children: why take a dangerous chance?  Too often infants have suffered injuries and even death in their parents’ bed.  Keep your baby safe with a well padded basinet or crib.  Have a quiet dark area where your baby can sleep undisturbed, during the day, this could be in the play pen in the family room.  Initially mother and baby will need a lot of rest.  As your baby grows older, sleeping time becomes less important.  It is very important to remember: all babies are different.  It is fine to take well meaning advice from others about your baby’s sleep time, but, the number one expert is you and your baby.  I have had babies who luxuriated in 3 or 4 hour naps, I have had babies, who were absolutely done after 30 minutes.  My oldest son never took a nap again after age 2, several of my younger children took naps until age 5.  As your child gets older and needs sleep less, you may need to begin using the term “rest time.”  I have many friends who used that term with their children and the children never suspected that it was mommy who needed rest!

Babies also need calming time.  Your baby will not want to nap after a rousing game of Peek a Boo with you.  Schedule your play time well before nap time.  Sometimes you may run out of energy long before your baby does.  This is where you must learn to plan well.  Learning your baby’s rhythm and matching it with your own will be a big part in the planning process.  It is important to engage a good support system that is ready to reach out when you need it.  Most mothers and fathers have learned to nap when their babies nap.  Get it while you can!

Emotional Well Being:

Infants sense from the very beginning the mood of their environment.  Here is where many parents make their first mistakes.  It is a mistake to believe that your infant is unaware of the emotional health of your environment.  Of course on a broader level, parents should be dedicated to their own mental health such that they can be clear about their work as a parent.

As discussed before, according to Erik Erikson the very first stage that a human must traverse successfully is the trust vs. mistrust stage.  It’s important to remember that, as a parent, if your heart and mind are in the right place, all activities, all actions will fall properly into place of their own accord.  So, while it is important to understand psychological dynamics, the truth is that most research is based on our behavior as it is, therefore, understand, that on a primal level we know all of this stuff.

What gets in the way of our successful response to our child, is all of the “projecting” and belief structures that we shroud everyday moments in.  An example of this, is the old idea of forcing a scheduled onto your newborn infant.  This idea came out of a thought pattern that parents need stay “in control” and “discipline” youngsters.  It is clear that four week old infants have no consciousness, no awareness of what time of the day it is.  When an infant cries it is responding to something happening internally, perhaps a response to a cold environment that the infants finds uncomfortable or even painful.  Enforcing the schedule with an infant is ludicrous.

As the infant gets older it is important to begin establishing boundaries and giving over responsibility.  How do you give responsibility to an infant?  One of the first reliefs I experienced as a mother is when my four-month-old infant held his own bottle.  He was eager and willing to take the responsibility for his own feeding when not breastfeeding.  And so it goes from there.

I compare this phenomena to the “Push me – Pull you” llama in children’s stories.  Sometimes, as a parent, I am in a hurry to give over responsibilities to my children.  Sometimes as a parent my child demands responsibilities that she is unequal to, and then I resist.  The starkest example I can think of is my two year old daughter’s insistence on her own “style”.  She wore exactly what she wished to wear, I was allowed to do laundry and that was all.  Nothing ever matched, beautiful ensembles ended up separated and abused.  My two-year-old’s definition of dressing for a party was definitely not MY definition of dressing for a party.  Summertime was the worst.  Not a one of my toddlers would wear clothing.  They were ingenious about taking it off and hiding it and brilliant with their nonchalance.  When I asked them where their clothes were, I received a blank expression of angelic innocence.  Dressing my daughter was not a responsibility that I wished to relinquish, but I had no choice.  Fighting with a two year old needs to be worthwhile, not about control and not about my projection of the way things ought to be.  Interestingly enough, this 20-year-old child is now a fashion princess, she and her older sister will often buy MY clothing, because I don’t know enough about fashion.

There are some parenting struggles, trials and tribulations that no one can help you with.  They are steps in the process.  While you are going through them it is important to remember that these struggles pass you by and newer, better days follow.  If the struggle hangs on longer than it should there are two possibilities, 1) your patience is being tried and 2) you (the parent) are causing the struggle and for whatever reason are hanging onto it.

Some adults forget that they are in control of the relationship.  This is very different than being in control of the child.  Any parent will tell you that you are not in control of the child.  You can have peace in your home, if you sustain peace in your relationship and understand the dynamics of childhood.