Thanks you, dear reader, for you patience while I was on parental leave.
Parental leave is so you can bond with your baby and care for it, because the new situation is strange and requires a lot of work. After leave ends, it’s still a lot of work and you still come across new, strange situations, but you gotta suck it up and go back to your real responsibilities anyway.
To prepare for the oddities of life with a new baby, I read all the books I could find on this topic. They overstated some issues (diapering), and understated some others (how to hold a tiny, weak creature that can’t hold its head up). But they simply didn’t prepare me for some issues:
You need to feed a baby every two to three hours. Great. But what on earth do you do when each feeding lasts two to three hours?
They tell you you need to sleep when the baby sleeps. But how on earth do you do that when the baby falls asleep as you are feeding, and wakes just as you place her in her bassinet?
They tell you that a baby cries because she is hungry, or has a dirty diaper, or is physically uncomfortable - too hot, too cold, etc. Sometimes, you can cycle through all these things twice, and not figure out which of these reasons it’s crying for. And then it turns out in the period you were trying to figure it out, she’s dirtied her diaper again, and is hungry again.
Books don’t prep you for this. They like to make infancy into a neat, predictable sequence of feeding, diapering and sleeping. In reality, all three happen at the same time sometimes.
I don’t blame those authors. It takes months to write a book, and years to get it published if you go the traditional route. By then, you’ve forgotten how helpless the alien you brought home from the hospital was, and instead think a baby is a smiling, grabbing creature who can hold his head up. Those are two very different animals, and what works for one does not work for the other.
So most baby books are useless, but you should read them anyway.
Here are some:
The Mommy Docs Ultimate Guide To Pregnancy And Birth by a bunch of obgyn doctors who are also moms and also have a TV show about the obstetric emergency room. This was actually a good read. It had several very useful lists and gave a very accurate picture of what pregnancy and birth are like. But it’s a bit pointless because unless you’re in that particular stage of pregnancy, it doesn’t make sense to you in a real way. For instance, there’s a lot of space dedicated to all the scary health issues that come with pregnancy. But you won’t experience 99% of them, and when you do, your doctor is going to tell you what to do anyway.
Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth by some lady who has a farm in the boonies where women come to give birth. It’s a nice read to make childbirth seem less scary than all the media in the West will have you believe. But the issue is, all those stories don’t mean shit when your doctor is telling you things aren’t going according to plan, and we might have to think of other options. Other people’s natural birth success stories are great and all, but you don’t know their specific medical situation that it worked out for them, and how it compares to yours. And everyone thinks their pain management techniques are great, until they are hit with some very real pain. Mind you, those things help, but you need to practice them until you can do them when you’re in massive pain, and even then, they might not work for you.
Cherish The First Six Weeks by Elton John’s baby’s nanny. This book told me that if I had a System, the baby would be sleeping through the night by six weeks. My baby said I Don’t Care and asserted further, I Cry At Night. You need to feed babies on demand, and you cannot train them to demand better, given their tiny, immature digestive systems. Further, this book tried to scare me that if I didn’t show the baby who’s boss in six weeks, I’d end up with a difficult child. That held no merit, because babies change every two weeks anyway, and you were never the boss, the baby always was, and before her, it was the cat.
Cribsheet and Expecting Better by an economist who thinks she can data-hack pregnancy and childbirth. I didn’t get through these books completely, but who does Randomized Controlled Trials of anything child-related? The more I read studies about child safety and what helps colic, the more it seems like woo-woo. The only thing you can really do is have at least one person watching the baby like a hawk at all times for the first couple of months, and figure out by trial and error what helps your baby’s colic. “Studies say” there’s no benefit to keeping a baby inclined after feeding to reduce colic, but conducting eight or more such trials every day for weeks, I can say there is plenty of benefit. This author tries to sift through the evidence for you, but sifting through garbage only gives you more refined, easier to absorb garbage.
The Fifth Trimester by some lady from a fashion magazine who now writes self help and also novels. I quite liked this one, but given it’s a pandemic, all of the wisdom here goes straight out the window. There’s no need to dress for work. No one’s sending their kid to daycare. People are more understanding of parents now. But it’s a good read, nevertheless and the author’s writing style is very engaging.
I Know How She Does It - How Successful Women Make The Most Of Their Time by some lady who has made a thing out of timesheets people send to her detailing how they spend their every minute. I REALLY LOVED THIS ONE AND HIGHLY RECOMMEND IT. It’s a well-written book that paints a very encouraging picture of what is possible to do with your time. According to this book, highly successful women still don’t work more than 50-55 hours a week, doing chores more often doesn’t keep your house cleaner, and we all get more sleep than we think we do (not me, but most people). This book was in direct contrast to Overwhelmed - How To Work, Love And Play When No One Has The Time by some lady who was an overworked journalist with a depressing view of the world where she thinks women never had any leisure for all of history (Just on the face of that, that seems a stupid claim, because it’s impossible for 50% of humanity through 6000+ years of history to never have had a spare moment or a fun time). Overwhelmed seemed to not really look at the objective reality of parents who managed to have good, fulfilling lives (which is most of them) and instead chose to look for why the author constantly felt flustered, by speaking with “experts”. I Know How She Does It however does, and that’s what makes it a superior book.
Experimenting With Babies by some guy who is incredibly fun and curious about children. It’s 50 small things to try on your baby at every stage of development. I’ve only done a few so far. It’s a great way to understand how babies develop and what is instinct and what is learned behavior. I love the concept, and the experiments, and I give a copy to every new parent.
An oldie, but goodie - I found myself listening and re-listening to the There Is A Drunk Midget In My House chapter of Tina Fey’s Bossypants. It is the closest to reality it gets to the travails of breastfeeding, pumping, formula, going back to work, other crazy parents, and so many other parenting things. And she writes about these dark, depressing topics with so much joy and humor that I was able to laugh through the hard parts of my experience (when I wasn’t bursting into tears, of course).
I must say here that I wished there were books about parenting with an Indian perspective that had the same level of rigor and depth as these books. In India, it is just assumed that you’ll have your parents teaching you how to parent, and no one even tries to put in the effort and rigor to write such a book.
With a lot of these research-based books, I found myself saying “But so many Indian parents don’t do X and their kids all turn out fine”. Heck, even with the whole debate about putting babies to sleep on their back (yes, that is something parents debate), no one seems to be looking to India where babies fall asleep in a baby hammock which is totally not a flat surface by any means, and we’re all fine. If anything, there’s some Indian doctors who are starting to say thoolis (baby hammocks) are dangerous, despite there being a ton of lived experience that says otherwise.
It feels important now more than ever to document our child-rearing practices. That’s something we do really well, and it’s imperative we write it down, research our practices and document them. As Emily Oster’s two books will tell you, there’s a lot of bad science involved in recommendations for babies, and when our practices are derided as ‘unsafe’ in favor of these badly researched recommendations that change every 10 years or so, it’s time to fight back, with more research, better studies, and the strength of our lived experience.
Anyway. My friend Hannah Hulbert wrote a cute little children’s book with her 8-year-old daughter, titled Badger In The World - Badger Strikes Back. Do check it out, the link is to a video of the illustrated book being narrated by her. The book was in response to someone saying “You can’t write a bad book with a badger in it”, and she proved them right; it is a most excellent book.