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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   2931 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 9, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What is your top baby/kid advice? We are in the third trimester with our first. Revolutionary must have gadget, let them cry it out, co-sleep don't co-sleep, have a closet lined with mirrors to lock them in?

Buy baby nail trimmers in case they come out with sharp little nails and scratch themselves.

Congrats! It’s really fun, you’ll probably have a blast.

You’re about to lose a lot of your personal time, especially if you have two. The excitement and lack of sleep will keep it from hurting much for the first few months, but after that you’ll be like, alright, I’m ready to read/videogame/code/do whatever, and the kids keep taking my time. Just keep in mind this is a relatively short time in your life. When your kids turn 5-6 they’ll start school and have their own lives, and you won’t see them quite as much. By the time your children are 12, you’ll have spent 75% of all the time you’ll ever spend with them.

I’d nudge you to have more kids than you’re thinking. There’s a book about this, but the argument roughly goes: Most people optimize for the amount of kids they want to have when the kids are young. But that time doesn’t last very long, relatively. Optimize for some mixture including how many kids you want to have when the kids are 10 / 15 / 20 / 25.

Your own emotional control will likely be a major factor in your ability to be a good parent. Parenting is frustrating and sad and scary and all that. But the kids need you to be reliable, and able to handle the tiny disasters they’re throwing at you. If you can be a rock under pressure with kids screaming at you, you’ll make a better parent.

Also, for whatever reason, being outside is magical for young kids. I can have them inside with a million toys, and they’ll be bored, but outside in a plain yard with an old soccer ball, and they’re happy for hours. Other families have concurred. shrug

I am 95% confident that in 30 years I'll be happy I had as many healthy kids as possible. The issue is that we are in our mid 30's so time is on on our side. My brother in law wanted 6 then his second wrecked him and my sister (who is tough) so I'm 70% confident that I could push through 4 which I think is the max we could safely push to at our ages and handle the miseries that will come with having 3-4 young kids. I think it will mostly be on my wife. I'll need to take on a lot of responsibility and cut back on my frugal desires to keep her on board. I think I'd rather have more kids then a few extra hundred grand at retirement.

People aren't very good about making the distinction, but note the difference between the Ferber method and "cry it out". The Ferber method is good and effective, and cry-it-out is kinda mean and not very effective. tl;dr (but you should actually read up on the Ferber method before having a baby so you can do it): the Ferber method is to put your baby down drowsy but awake and let them cry for a set amount of time before going in to comfort them. The Ferber method offers guidelines for how often to check in on crying children and how to provide reassurance. You'll progressively increase the time between each check-in, ultimately teaching your kid to be able to put themselves to sleep.

If you're looking for a Baby Monitor, we've enjoyed using the Wyze cameras. They're like 40$ on amazon, connect to your phone and are weatherproof so you can use them outside when you're done. We also have a backup simple VTech transmitter/reciever that we use for travelling/sleeping.

First: Congratulations!

I have four kids, oldest is five, youngest is four months. So I have a decent amount of experience with babies.

Sleep: The Back is Best campaign is probably responsible for a lot of only children. There was a study showing that booster seat legislation probably acted to prevent more births than the number of deaths it prevented. I would bet my life savings that the Safe Sleep campaign has also done so. That said, once you see your baby, you will be willing to suffer quite a lot to give them an extra 0.001% chance of survival. So here is how to make it suck less.

Sleep sacks are essential. For kids under 1 month, I prefer the Fleece Halo Sleepsack. As long as you have AC at home, I recommend the fleece. The cotton one kept riding up over my babies' faces. Once the baby starts to free their hands from the sleep sack, around six weeks, I recommend switching to the LoveToDream SwaddleUp or a good dupe. Always keep doubles of all sleep garments and sheets. Your child probably will not stay awake for a whole wash/dryer cycle until they are six months. The first three months you will be doing a lot of tiny loads of laundry.

For the first year, pretty much every week you will have a different baby. If you don't like what's going on, hang on a week! It will change (not always for the better.)

The first twelve weeks there is a lot more crying. Part of this is probably due to the digestion system developing and causing tummy pain and difficulty pooping/farting. You will learn to cheer on baby farts. The other trouble is that early on, a baby only has 20-40 minutes of staying awake before they get overtired. Once overtired, a baby cannot fall back asleep as easily and gets frustrated. Some babies will take longer to eat than the span of their wake time. This will be a source of frustration to you.

Pay attention to temperature. Smaller babies need more bundling up - they don't have as much hair, they don't even have bone between their brains and the outside. If a baby has a hard time getting back to sleep, especially at night, check your thermostat. You might have a night time setting to make things colder.

There is a difference between cry it out and not responding to every peep your baby makes. Some babies are just noisy. If a baby starts making noise, wait a minute before running to touch them. Pay attention to what the sounds are like. Are they getting louder, more high pitched, and closer together? That is a sign of crying. But the first week or so a newborn makes a lot of weird sounds. One kid sounded like a van with squeaky brakes.

If you do decide to cry it out, make sure you know what the goals are. Crying it out will remove your child's reliance on sleep aids that are not present when they wake up at night. It will not make it so that they are no longer hungry at night, if they are getting half their daily calories at night. It will not make it so that they don't soak through their diaper and need to be changed every night. It just helps you get them to sleep when you set them down in their sleep environment, with less crying overall. Read "Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems" by Dr. Ferber before doing anything - I haven't found a blogpost or other resource that explains everything needed.

Something like https://www.amazon.com/Fisher-Price-Deluxe-Kick-Play-Piano/dp/B076HYFZ37 is very helpful for the 3-6 month range. Babies are like plants. Outside of a few smiles and songs, they mostly like to be left alone on the floor near something they can grab.

A good range of books (each has their own very different and clashing philosophy, but take what makes sense for you and leave the rest):

On Becoming Baby Wise: Giving Your Infant the Gift of Nighttime Sleep - There must have been some edition decades ago where the author advocated for baby torture or something. This book is loathed by some people. But when I read it I saw nothing objectionable. A lot of the advice is the same as what you will find in Happiest Baby on the Block, which is a cherished book. I liked the presentation here better and overall found this book more helpful.

Elevating Child Care: A Guide To Respectful Parenting - I cannot say I'm a perfect Respectful Infant Educaring (RIE) parent, but starting off approaching problems from the RIE perspective has proven helpful (even if it doesn't always survive contact with the enemy.) The research seems to indicate that helping kids identify their emotions and not try to repress them helps kids behave better in the long run. RIE is one parenting philosophy that makes this easy. I like this book because it creates a narrative, a mindset, in which I can make sense of parenting choices. I don't know if I can explain it better, but I recommend the book all the same.

How to Talk so Little Kids will Listen - someone already recommended this I think, I like the little kid version.

Bringing up Bebe - Helps set the expectation that you can still have a good life and kids. Kids are not all you are.

Edit because there's a lot more I could say:

Get a carseat/stroller combo, the kind where you can remove the carseat and plop it straight onto a stroller without waking the baby.

You need to be your child's advocate. Basic things that you would think a doctor would do often are ignored. For example, one kid lost 10% of his birth weight and the lactation consultant, pediatrician, etc acted like it was my fault. They had me nurse him, then feed him milk from a bottle, then pump, every 2 hours day and night. The whole process took 1.5 hours and then I had 30 minutes of break/sleep in between. Exhausting. A year later, at his first dental check up, the dentist mentioned that he had a very bad Posterior Tongue Tie, something that was likely the cause of the poor weight gain and something not one doctor pointed out.

My go to parenting recommendation is the book 'How to Talk so Kids will Listen, and How to Listen so Kids will Talk"

https://www.amazon.com/How-Talk-Kids-Will-Listen/dp/0380811960/ref=sr_1_5?crid=1KHJZHDQU3DZV&keywords=how+to+talk+so+kids+will+listen&qid=1688987894&sprefix=how+to+talk+so+kid%2Caps%2C216&sr=8-5

Perhaps more in tune for once you've figured out how to keep them alive for a year or so ...

Beyond that, one of the things that make humans distinctive in the animal kingdom is how adaptable to different environments we are. Your kid is only here because their ancestors figured out how to adapt and survive famines, wars, ice ages, economic collapses (at least well enough to keep the line going) .... In the grand scheme of things any particular decision you make about a parenting gadgets or sleeping techniques, the kid will probably survive.

Try different stuff, figure out what works for your family.

One thing that worked for us, my wife breastfed for the better part of a year or so, about a month in, she read that if you give the baby a bottle of formula at bedtime, kid digests formula slower than breast milk, less likely to be hungry and wake up in the middle of the night.

Bedtime was the main time we gave the kid formula, but worked like a charm for getting the kid to sleep through the night, which put us in considerably saner moods.

CS is better than VB if the baby is in a weird position.

Co-sleeping really worked for my wife. We pushed the crib next to our bed and removed the front grate. This way she could breastfeed the baby almost without waking up.

There's a really annoying stage around, uh, five months or so (it's been so long ago I don't remember the month) when the kid is old enough to get bored and frustrated and not old enough to entertain themselves. This is probably the most frustrating part of the first year, as for a month or two the baby will demand lots of attention. Before that it's mostly eat-sleep-poop with a little bit of playtime, and after that you can blow their mind with kitchenware.

We had a breach baby and they did an ECV to flip them around, so that we could do a vaginal birth. Basically a doctor pushes on the belly in certain ways to get the baby head-down. Worked for us! Though I hear a lot of doctors won’t do it because there are risks.

I think the most annoying stage so far is the one where they can walk with a hand but not otherwise. They then want to walk all the time, so you’re stuck in a hunched over position to keep them happy.

I think the most annoying stage so far is the one where they can walk with a hand but not otherwise. They then want to walk all the time, so you’re stuck in a hunched over position to keep them happy.

Haha, we've skipped this part, but I remember when I had to take a day off and rush to our dacha because our son had discovered stairs and wanted to go up and down them for hours. My wife was sick and couldn't hold his hand, and my MIL was getting dizzy after walking up and down the stairs too much.

I have a 7-month-old, and I'm his primary caretaker. I do this while working from home at the same time. The most important advice is that time is precious, and finding ways to cope with the drastic change to your life is vital if you're looking to optimize the wellness of your family as a whole during the transition to being a parent. You and your partner will need wellness time to recharge and recover and stave off fatigue. You may feel like you're giving 120% when your partner thinks you are giving 70%, and vice versa.

In regard to stuff: Dr. Brown's formula pitchers (they mix the formula and you let them sit in the fridge for a few hours so there are fewer bubbles) and bottles (they're plastic, I know, but they have a device that has an anti-colic feature, and my kid could hold them propped at 4 months). I have a hiking backpack with a seat for my tot by Kelty and a top-of-the-line jogging stroller that allows me to get out of the house and enjoy life. Both are worth it as they make it easy to spend time recharging my battery while letting my kid explore the world. My house has been subsumed by a tsunami of clothes and toys, so much time is spent on inventory management. The more you can limit the inflow of stuff, the better off you will be as you will have extra time. Finally, I normally despise screen time for kids, but starting at about 3 months, I was able to use Hey Bear Sensory on YouTube to steal 20 minutes of time for chores here and there.

Jump into #2 quickly*! Seriously. Giving your kid a sibling they can play with is something that will pay off for them their whole life. It will also help you out tremendously when they're tots looking for attention you don't have. It might seem crazy to jump back in quickly, but it's probably easier than starting all over again several years later.

*By this I mean within 1.5-3 years, My first two are 16 months apart and even though it was a total unexpected surprise, it was the greatest thing we ever could have done. They are best friends and they keep each other occupied for hours a day that they would either be lonely or staring at screens

They are best friends and they keep each other occupied for hours a day that they would either be lonely or staring at screens

Alternatively they might fight constantly and cause more stress.

You have to teach them strategies for when they both want conflicting things. For example, if both of my oldest want the same toy, I restrain the kids from grabbing it out of the other's hands and ask them to use their words first.

"Can I have that?"

"No!"

Then I ask what they want to try next, find something to trade or to wait for their turn.

Because I have two kids close in age, I am able to teach them this in person, as conflicts happen. If I didn't have a brood, my single kid would have to learn these lessons in a different environment, most likely from a different person who might not be as good as I at teaching this lesson.

We are a little older so we're looking to move as quick as possible. The real question is probably more what's too soon rather than too long, as long as fertility stay high, which wasn't a problem with this one.

Swaddle the kid, if you have problems breast feeding check out the Brezza Formula Pro (formula keurig is how I’d describe it but it doesn’t use proprietary formula or anything), your wife may be somewhat crazy for some months. You need to keep her sane even if she doesn’t want to be kept sane.

This is literally what my wife said today. "If breast feeding isn't working find me the Keurig formula thing"

It’s way easier than manually mixing formula.

If you have a good relationship with you and your spouses parents they can often give the most relevant advice. By that I mean they raised a kid pretty similar to the one you are having.

Thankfully we do, all 4 of them are within 30 minutes. She's been talking to our mom's quite a bit.

Have a car seat with a handle that also attaches to a stroller. Being able to shift a sleeping baby out of the car either onto a stroller or into a shopping cart while leaving them in their carseat / bucket is useful. Practice with the empty seat securing it into it's base in the car and onto it's fixture on a stroller.

I am single and childless but surrounded by parents, and my number one take away is this- don't get neurotic. Your kids will probably be fine. If you are a motteizan I assume you're smart and have half-decent judgement and the income to buy your way out of the most obvious problems, so your kids will probably be fine. Just don't get neurotic about it- you can worry about worst case scenarios until you're blue in the face, the only effect it'll have is to make you miserable and stressed out. Remember that most of the things pitched to parents to worry about are not particularly likely, especially if you are a decently conscientious person who doesn't live in impoverished squalor, so listen to common sense advice and don't get overstressed about whatever scenario. Your kid probably has IQ points to spare and will have decent life outcomes, you don't have to get into a grindset. If you do the only thing it'll do is make you miserable and stress your kid out.

I currently (could all change when the kid comes) subscribe to Caplan's philosophy. Pretty much if you feed them and don't beat them they'll probably turn out how they're were going to turn out. Both of us do feel like our parents kind of left some things out and we got a bit of a late start on some things so hopefully we can influence our kids at least a little.

We have a one month old right now.

  • Consider a doula, if you find one you click with they can be a life saver

  • For us, sleeping in shifts at night has worked better than trading off waking up. The baby sleeps in a separate room and whoever is on duty sleeps on a couch next to them so we each get some long, uninterrupted naps

  • Killer gadget for us was a white noise machine, he sleeps a lot better and it blocks out any noise we make moving around the house

  • If you want to breastfeed meet with a lactation consultant ahead of time, insurance covered ours 100% and also paid for a breast pump. It's been a big help.

  • Buy a few brands of swaddle wraps now so you can try them out and see which you prefer once they're born, then you can buy more of that type. I prefer the velcro ones over zipper but ymmv

I have 3 kids under 6 right now and strongly endorse every one of these recommendations. Doula's are absolutely worth the money, and you should be shopping around for one ASAP if you don't already have one.

Make sure you and so, starting at 6-9 months, have a trustworthy babysitter you can leave the kids with and have a sanity-keeping weekend.

A bunch of us decided to get knocked up around the same time. We're thinking rotating date nights where we unload the kids on one couple. Though 6-9 months might be a little young for that.

6-9 months is not "too young" for a capable parent to hang out with your kid for a 2-hour dinner.

This is a wild myth fabricated whole cloth by fucking millennials. At 4 months you should be starting on "cry it out" and then very soon after that be comfortable with an adult babysitter. (And yes cry it out is 100% the correct move)

Now, does reality matter? I doubt it. Whoever in the friend group decides to start living some semblance of their life again the soonest will be branded as the least devoted parent, so you'll all play chicken and stay locked in your houses :) it's gonna be great!

In that ultra early period you can only really leave them with someone you can trust, like a responsible family member, but imo it's super important to ensure you and your SO do in fact get some alone time that isn't just with baby.

Set up some location where you can put your awake, active child down, and safely not pay attention to your child for a while. Maybe that's one of those plastic fence things in the middle of the room. Maybe it's a dedicated room. (Move all grabbable items out of reach. That may even mean moving electrical outlets up to your eye height.) You have some time before this becomes important, but now's the time to plan.

I used to call that plastic fence "baby prison". And it is quite useful with a crawling kid. Also put a thick cushioned mat beneath it, play tables, etc.

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