A reflection on dad-guate school
Introduction
Once again, I am writing an essay about something I am underqualified to write about. Well, at least I’m partially qualified. In December 2025, our son was born, so I am a dad! That partially qualifies me to write this essay. The problem, though, is that there was a mix-up at the hospital and the medical team forgot to calibrate our baby’s difficulty settings, so they left him on “easy” mode. Plus, you should never trust advice from someone who only had one baby: that’s too few points for a linear regression!
Nonetheless, I am going ahead and writing this essay. In part because the early days of parenting are easily forgotten, lost in the much bigger whirlpool of early childhood. I want to catalog my thoughts to help other new parents navigate these early moments. It will be funny to look back on this some day and laugh at how naive I was!
The early stages
When telling folks what to expect in the first days, weeks, and months, the helpful mnemonic I have shared is: for the first week, each day is different. For the first month, each week is different. For the first year, each month is different. This is… not entirely accurate, but good enough.
Concretely, this means that if you are searching for advice online for a three-week only baby, you need to specifically see what worked for three-week-old babies: two-week old babies and four-week old babies are going to be slightly different. If you have a two-month old baby, then you can see what worked for other two-month-old babies, even if they are a few weeks apart.
A vast majority of concern in the very beginning is just sleeping and eating. As long as the baby is fed and sleeping, you are doing a great job. Try not to pressure yourself with unreasonable expectations that by the end of the third month they will be astronauts who can play the accordion while speaking seven languages. They should do that all by the time they are one, of course!
Preparations
In the leadup to having a baby, we read a few books, including the famous Emily Oster books (Expecting Better and Cribsheet) and a book on sleep: How Babies Sleep (Sofia Axelrod). We participated in a group pregnancy/birth class, took a 12-hour pregnancy/birth/baby class (three 4-hour sessions), and listened to the “evidence-based birth” podcast.
Overkill? Maybe. Maybe not.
Having a baby is certainly a unique life experience, but not so unique that you cannot prepare for it. Like studying for a test, the more you prepare the less you are likely to panic in the moment.
Three things we did that were, in hindsight, the most helpful (besides the classes and book):
First, before even getting pregnant, we found an online list of “100 questions to ask before having a kid.” We went through most of the list, though eventually it became somewhat repetitive. This helped us align our parenting goals and helped us know where we expected to excel and where we expected to need help.
Second, especially in the leadup to birth, we talked about some of the most difficult situations we’ve encountered together, how we dealt with them, and what factors influenced the quality of the outcomes. This helped prepare us for birth and stressful situations.
Third, we watched several YouTube videos of parents describing their routines with 3-week-old babies. Turns out there is a whole genre of influencers who, upon having children, temporarily take a break from their regular programming to video blog about their first few weeks of parenthood. These are especially helpful because, while classes cover the “average” case reasonably well, the videos showed how the dice can land for specific babies.
Parental Leave
Many families take different approaches to splitting parental leave. For us, we decided to take some time together, followed by my wife taking the rest of her leave and then me taking the rest of my leave. As for how much time to take together: I recommend between 4 and 8 weeks. There are a few important milestones: by 6 weeks, your wife is likely to be mostly recovered if she had an uncomplicated birth. By 8 weeks, your baby is likely to have some predictability to their sleep schedule (they will still wake up several times at night, but you will be able to anticipate when.) Of course, you might hit these milestones a bit early. In my case, I planned to return to work at 6 weeks, but things ended up going quite well and I instead returned at just 4 weeks.
How to birth a baby (as a dad)
Good news. If you are a dad, you are not doing the hard part! Here are a few key pieces of advice in the weeks leading up to birth.
For one month before the due date, do not make any plans that cannot be cancelled. Beyond the chance that the baby arrives early, things start to get pretty chaotic a few weeks before the due date. Specifically, if any of a dozen measurements they take of the baby look bad, they will probably ask you to come in for “more tests.” Expect to spend a lot more than your scheduled appointments at the doctor’s office. In our case, due to gestational hypertension, we visited the doctor almost every other day leading up to the birth for NSTs, ultrasounds, etc.
For folks who have led a relatively healthy life, giving birth might be your first extended interaction with the medical system. Some like to say this is where you learn to “advocate for yourself.” I think that sounds a bit harsh, as it implies that providers are not thinking about your best interests. I believe they are! It is likely that you will see a lot of care providers all trying to act in your best interest. But reasonable people can disagree about the best path under the same circumstances. As such, I think you learn to act as a “single source of truth.” For example, at a certain point in our birth our midwife recommended an amniotomy over increasing the pitocin levels. Other providers suggested that increasing the pitocin might be wiser. It was up to us to decide. Either path probably would have been fine, but we opted to increase pitocin over an amniotomy.
When it comes to the day of the birth itself, the #1 tip I got from another dad was this: SLEEP! The crazy thing about labor is that it can go on for a long time and the pain ramps up as it goes. During early labor, help your wife when she needs it. When she does not need your help, try to get some sleep. Even if you are not tired. The reason for this is because when things do ramp up, your wife will be in her most sleep-deprived state. You want to be able to support her to the best of your abilities!
If you happen to be reading this and you’re the one giving birth, I’ll first say: I do not envy you. There is a lot of debate online about the merits of an epidural. I cannot know for sure, but I imagine if I were giving birth I would ask for an epidural, especially if I had already been in labor for a while. The pain relief is nice, but another benefit is the “epidural nap,” a chance to get some rest in the middle of labor. This is nice because you’re about to do an intense four-hour workout routine called “pushing.”
In our case, we chose to hire a birth doula. I joked afterward that I was there for my wife and the doula was there for me! While the hospital staff rotates on 12 or 24 hour shifts, your doula will be there the whole time focused entirely on you. Of course, you could have a trusted family member serve this role, too.
Advice on feeding
In the beginning, your baby needs to eat and sleep. Their wake windows are short. Just enough time to eat.
My #1 piece of advice to facilitate eating for the first week: before the baby is born, collect colostrum! Colostrum is what the baby eats before the “regular” milk comes in, which could take a few days after birth. While it is possible for your body to create enough colostrum in the moment, you will be incredibly happy if you have a lot of it saved up. In our case, my wife started collecting colostrum three weeks before the birth. Per the advice of our provider, she collected it in syringes and froze them. We brought them with us to the hospital and were able to supplement our baby’s first few meals with them.
Expect the process of breastfeeding to be frustrating at first. One friend advised us: learning to breastfeed is like learning to play the violin. You would not pick up the violin for the first time and expect to immediately play a Mozart concerto. You and your baby are learning a new motor skill. It is going to be difficult at first, but will get easier with time.
Your baby may spend a lot of time eating in their first few weeks and months. In our case, during his first few weeks, his feeding sessions could easily take 40 minutes. It can be worth investing in a few things to make the breastfeeding experience easier. We really appreciated having the “My Breast Friend” pillow (and I would even use it when feeding from a bottle). We also made great use of milk collectors. Milk collectors catch excess letdown. Apparently, it is common to have a little excess milk production when the milk first comes in. If you can save this milk, do so! After a few months, milk production slows down and it can be helpful to have some frozen milk to thaw and provide to your baby. To track feeds (and sleep), we used the “NaraBaby” app, a free app with basic tracking functionality.
Most babies give physical cues when they are hungry, such as “rooting,” “yawning,” or “diving.” It is worth either taking a class or watching a video showing these behaviors, so that you can recognize them. Your baby might gravitate towards one, as ours did. In addition, feeding videos will cover the various breastfeeding holds as well as techniques to help the baby latch and suck, such as rubbing the jaw.
A common mantra is “you cannot overfeed a baby,” meaning you do not need to worry about them taking in too much food. They will self-regulate. That said, babies will also naturally suck on the nipple as a form of comfort, so if you have a feeding session going over an hour it is worth seeing if there is something else causing them to seek comfort. In the first few weeks, they are probably either over-tired or gassy.
If you do want to feed your baby breast milk from a bottle, our providers recommended giving the baby their first bottle between week 4 and 6. They also recommended using a small nipple size. We used a “Premie” nipple for a few weeks, then upgraded to a “Size 1” nipple for the first several months. We eventually went up to “Size 2” and stuck with that for the rest of his bottle use. We never used “Size 3” or “Size 4.”
Advice on sleeping
Before having a baby, my #1 fear was that I would never get enough sleep for the rest of my life. In my sleep deprived state, I would start having hallucinations and eventually found a new religion. Well, maybe not that second part. Still, I had a lot of apprehension about sleep in particular.
Our baby started sleeping through the night around 5 months. Until we have a second baby, we will not know if we are sleep training geniuses or just lucky. We attribute our success 95% to luck and 5% to strategy. I’ll detail what worked for us. Try to find what works for you. If your baby sleeps well, you will sleep well and everyone will be happier. Much of my advice comes from the book How Babies Sleep, which was a bit repetitive/verbose but ultimately had good advice.
When your baby emerges into the world, they are going to immediately experience 12 hours of jet leg. Why? Because in the womb, the feeling of mom walking around lulled them to sleep. When mom was lying down stationary, it was awake party time. In other words: they are used to being awake at night and sleeping during the day. Your job is to flip their day/night association to the “outside world” version. In addition, babies do not have large enough stomachs to get nutrients for a full night sleep, so it is inevitable that they will need to wake up several times at night while they stomach grows.
In How Babies Sleep, the top piece of advice is to use light cues. Blue light triggers receptors in the eye that tell our body to stop producing melatonin. Red light does not. Starting around 8PM at night, we would transition our house to “night mode.” We had heavy blackout curtains on all our bedroom windows and would close them. We replaced several of our light bulbs with red lights. Until 8AM the next day, we would try to minimize our use of lights and, if we needed them, we would only use red light lightbulbs. This included when we were changing our baby and feeding him. In the morning, when it was time to wake up, we would open our curtains and expose our baby to natural daylight, saying “good morning” and telling him it was time to start the day. We also did an “anchor feed” starting right after his morning diaper change. This was his only feed that we did on a schedule: the rest were done as needed. After the 8AM wake-up, one parent (usually my wife) would continue to sleep until noon.
Other techniques that facilitated nighttime sleep included a white noise machine and a swaddle. The white noise machine imitates the sounds a baby hears in the womb and drowns out loud sounds from elsewhere, soothing him. The swaddle prevents his arms from jerking around in his sleep, triggering what is known as the “startle reflex.”
Trying to soothe a sleeping baby can be stressful. One piece of advice I was given, which helped me, was to remember that a soothing technique requires time to work. When our baby was shrieking in the middle of the night, it was tempting to switch techniques frequently to find the “right one.” The problem is that babies are prone to sensory overload, so frequently switching comfort techniques can itself be counter-productive. Instead, I attempted each technique for at least 3 minutes (in my head, I counted to 200) before switching to something else.
Daytime naps were a completely different ballgame. Your baby will of course need to nap during the day, but you do not want to mimic nighttime sleep. In our case, we took this to an extreme: we did not use a swaddle or white noise machine and we put him to bed in a room with the curtain open so there was natural light. This may have slightly backfired on us, as he is not a great daytime napper, but it did mean that daytime naps and nighttime sleep were very distinct. At some point, he seemed loath to sleep without one of us in the room, so we bought an extra bassinet to keep in our common area.
In some cases, we did contact naps during the day. For that, we tried a variety of wraps, carriers, and slings. I loved the sling for the first few weeks since it left both my hands free. My wife loved her wrap. Eventually, when our baby got bigger I upgraded to a carrier, which was more ergonomic and distributed weight more evenly.
For the first several weeks, we made no attempt to stick to a daytime schedule. We let the baby sleep when he wanted to sleep. It is worth reading about the concept of “wake windows.” If your baby stays up for too long, they will become over-tired. Early on the baby will spend most of their wake window eating, with at most 15 minutes for play. This is entirely normal.
As your baby begins sleeping for longer stretches at night, you will want to set a bedtime and wake up time. How Babies Sleep recommends setting a wake up time first and working backwards from it. In our case, we eventually chose 8AM. If our baby woke up substantially before 8AM, we would shift bedtime later. If our baby needed to be woken up a little after 8AM, we started putting him to bed earlier. When he was a little older, he seemed to naturally gravitate toward a 7AM wake up, so we eventually settled on an 8PM bedtime and 7AM wake up.
Thus far, I’ve said a lot about how and when a baby sleeps, but not where. Like many baby care choices, this one can evoke strong opinions. The official recommendation from the American Academy of Pediatrics is to have your baby sleep in your room for his first year of life, but not in your bed. The official recommendation of Spider Man is that your baby should sleep in a web hanging from your ceiling. Should you trust the AAP or Spider Man? Hard to know!
There are some downsides to having your baby in your room. It turns out that babies are noisy sleepers. Unlike adults, they do not experience the same “sleep paralysis” so they can be surprisingly active/physical in their sleep, confusing parents into thinking they are awake. In addition, their air passages are comparatively small, so it is quite common for babies to snore or make clicking sounds with their mouth while asleep. Parents who find this extremely disruptive to their own sleep may consider moving their baby to their own room earlier.
In our case, we opted to keep our baby in our room, overcoming some of the initial discomfort of baby noises. An enormous advantage of having the baby in a bassinet by our bed was that we did not need to wake up and walk far to soothe him at night. In the early days, this usually meant giving him skin-to-skin contact in bed and letting him fall asleep on my chest before transferring him back to the bassinet. This continued to be helpful when nighttime wakeups were no longer accompanied by feeds. Instead, if he startled himself awake, I could simply roll over and reinsert a pacifier, adjust the swaddle, or put a comforting hand on him and he would usually fall back asleep within a few minutes.
Advice on getting help
In the first few weeks, babies need very frequent attention, both at night and during the day. The womb was cozy and warm. The new baby cannot regulate their core temperature so well, yet. While they should ultimately sleep on their own (on their back in the bassinet) at night, during the day they are likely to sleep much better if they are being held.
Even with two parents, having one parent constantly occupied with the new baby can be grueling. Get help!
In our case, we chose to hire a doula to help us overnight for the first six weeks. She visited us twelve times total over those two weeks, with more visits in the first two weeks and fewer in the last two weeks. If this option is available to you, I strongly recommend considering it.
For daytime help, hopefully you have family or friends who are willing to lend a hand. In this case, “lend a hand” can be quite literal. The best help a family or friend can provide is just holding the baby while the parents accomplish other tasks.
Advice on poop
If you had told me a year ago that I would be writing an essay on parenting, I would not have expected to have many opinions on poop. Of course, I knew that frequent diaper changes are a fact of life, I just wouldn’t have expected to have a non-trivial opinion on it worth sharing. Oh boy was I wrong!
At my wife’s suggestion, we tried two things that I would not have been motivated to try on my own: cloth diapers and elimination communication. I went from extreme skepticism to basically evangelizing them.
Cloth diapers sound like they are something that weird hippies do in between tree hugging sessions, but they are actually incredibly useful. Not only are they good for the environment, but when used properly they tend to result in fewer blowouts, earlier potty training, and better night sleep. If you want to be extremely frugal, you can even wash them yourself, but that is a cumbersome process. In our case, we used a local service called “Diaper Stork” which picked up the dirty diapers weekly, washed them, and dropped off fresh ones.
Elimination communication sounds like something oppressive governments do to political dissidents, but it is actually about teaching your baby to pee/poop with operant conditioning. (Operant conditioning also sounds like something oppressive governments do to political dissidents, but it is a concept in psychology.) The gist is this: when your baby is peeing or pooping, you make a “hissing” sound. They come to associate the sound with the peeing/pooping. You can then start holding them over a potty and making the associated sound and they will learn to use it. I was astonished at how quickly our baby started correctly peeing and pooping on the potty rather than in his diapers.
Closing thoughts
If you made it this far: congratulations! If you read this long rant, then you clearly have the patience necessary to be a parent. No further preparation needed!
In all seriousness, I’ve talked quite a bit about the physical journey of parenthood, but not the emotional one. This brings me to my number one piece of advice: go in expecting it to be hard!
I say that because, as with many things in life, your emotional response will depend on how reality compares to your expectations. If you train to run a marathon, you won’t feel overwhelmed running a 5k. If you train to run a 5k, you might find it very stressful to suddenly have to run a marathon.
In my case, friends told me how difficult parenting would be. We completely cleared our schedule and braced ourselves for a major challenge. When we were only getting a few hours of sleep a night, it was hard but it was something we felt we went into with eyes wide open. Conversely, if you go into parenting and expect it to be intuitive or easy, those same difficult experiences might feel a lot more shocking and throw you off kilter.
I’ll end on an uplifting note. At the risk of sounding stereotypical, know this: while having a baby can be frustrating at times (when both parents are exhausted and the baby won’t stop crying), it is overall an immensely joyful experience. Before I became a parent, others would tell me that their baby “preferred x” or they “wanted y” and I was quite skeptical. Now I know they were right! Over just our few months together, our baby and I have developed our own little world: favorite books, activities, games, sounds, songs, and more. Like middle school best friends who form a “secret club,” we’ve formed a special bond over the moments, memories, and communications that are unique to us…
And he’s only peed on me two or three times.