Bringing Up Bebe

What Hacker News says

1. theNJRSep 2022
   For the English speakers, there is Bringing up Bebe.

   My wife and I are expecting our first in November and are currently reading - and loving - this book. It’s a great reframe.

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2. krrrhMar 2020
   Not OP but I've got a 6 month old. I got some good advice from strangers and am compelled to pay it forward.

   I highly recommend the book Happiest Baby on the Block, and even more so, the video (still sold as a DVD, but you can also stream online[1]). There are a lot of shorter videos of the author, Harvey Karp doing his thing if you want a taste[2]). The basic idea is that because humans have to be born early due to skull size, babies have a virtual 4th trimester. For the first 3-4 months of life the best way to help them is to simulate the womb environment using the 5 S's: swaddling, sucking reflex, swaying (really more like jiggling), shhing (white noise), side or stomach position (for calming, not for sleeping). The right combination of these will activate a "calming reflex".

   Another good starter resource I recommend is the Wonder Weeks book and app. It marks out periods when your baby will be going through a "leap" in cognitive ability, which often are accompanied by fussy behaviour that seems to come out of nowhere. It's very reassuring to understand that your baby, who you think you had figured out, is currently a bit overwhelmed because they are all of a sudden seeing clearly beyond 8 inches or understanding that things are related to other things, and knowing that the fussing is a natural adjustment period to new skills and awareness makes their sudden shifts in behavior interesting rather than distressing.

   There are also 3-4 pages of great advice in the book Bringing up Bebe on the French approach to "sleep teaching", which revolves around taking a few minutes to watch a baby who wakes up crying instead of just picking them up right away, thus giving them a chance to fall back asleep naturally, combined with the idea of establishing a window between midnight and 5am when you calm a crying baby down with any method other than feeding. This helps them to establish the idea of nighttime and hopefully means that the parents can get some sleep. 4 hours of uninterrupted sleep is a godsend, especially for a breastfeeding mom.

   A couple of books that should appeal to a lot of the HN crowd are Emily Oster's Expecting More and Cribsheet which looks at various aspects of pregnancy and childcare from a research-focused perspective.

   Sleep training is really tough, and there are a lot of books out there that repeat the same ideas. I found Sleep Sense to have a pretty clearly laid method for "camping out" or "graduated extinction" aka "Ferberizing", both of which are more gentle than Weissbulth's full cry it out approach. YMMV and there are a lot of strong opinions on this. I'm in the middle of this so I'm less confident to make recommendations.

   Feel free to email me.

   [1] https://www.justwatch.com/ca/movie/the-happiest-baby-on-the-... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OtPSfyZXNw

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3. burlesonaDec 2019
   I agree what you’re saying is a problem, but it isn’t universal. Anecdotally the trend seems to match living preferences: parents in central cities tend to be less myopic about their kids, parents in the suburbs more so.

   For my wife and I, the book “Bringing Up Bebe” was really influential in how we thought about kids before and after we had them. It’s a perspective shift kind of like this: your newborn human can’t talk, can’t move, doesn’t have any hobbies, interests, or friends. Rather than bend your life around that, why not invite this child into your life, to join in your hobbies, meet your friends, etc.

   That may sound silly but it’s actually a pretty influential idea to latch on to. We don’t have a schedule wrapped around our kids, or weekends wrapped around our kids. We go places we want to go, and do things we want to do, and include the kids and tell them what we’re doing and why and invite them to join the fun. The great thing about kids is they’re pretty much up for anything, so they usually love this and jump in :)

   I think, as an adult, you also have to make a conscious choice to keep up your independent life.

   Losing your independence is something that happens to people for various reasons - you see it sometimes when people get married, and then they withdraw from all their old social life and kind of retreat into each other. It’s a lot of pressure to be someone’s entire world... I haven’t seen many of those couples stay happy.

   I think that’s the part of having kids that’s hardest. Because they do have needs and do have to be accommodated, it can be easy to just worry about taking care of them and give up on everything else because it’s not as easy as it used to be to maintain your independent life. But it’s a choice you make, and in my experience it’s deeply worthwhile.

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4. neonhomerSep 2019
   Not sure where you're from but I enjoyed Bringing Up Bébé by Pamela Druckerman. It's all about French style parenting as she's an American raising her children in France.

   https://www.amazon.com/dp/1594203334

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5. lasermike026Jan 2018
   American child rearing is unbalanced.

   Read this: Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting by Pamela Druckerman

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6. vkbMay 2016
   The more I read, the more I realize that fiction has a way of teaching the same lessons as nonfiction, only in a better, humane way that is not like someone lecturing at you from a podium, but more like a friend sitting down for a heart-to-heart conversation with you.

   In this vein, I've started catching up on all the classics I haven't read yet, and there are a lot of them. At first, I was hesitant to dive into classics, because I thought they were hard to read and highbrow. This has mostly not been the case (with the exception of Wuthering Heights, which I found impossible to get through).

   To wit, the best books I've read this year include:

   A Tale of Two Cities - Impossible to get through the first several chapters, but after that, you're off to the races between France and England in the 18th century. Dickens used historical books as reference, but recreated the mood entirely from imagination. A better primer than anything in the news about Anglo-French relations, learning trust, and sacrifice.

   No Country for Old Men - Want to understand the current fear of the Mexican border that has so bolstered Trump's popularity, as well as the ramifications of having a country full of veterans who don't have any medical support or care? Read this book.

   Farenheit 451, A Clockwork Orange, Handmaid's Tale - Much better and scarier than any news clipping today about the possible future path for government interference in thought and action. Takes things to their logical conclusions.

   And one non-fiction book that I did enjoy, Bringing Up Bebe, which is about the contrasts between child-rearing in France and America, but on a much larger scale, about the different things that seem culturally obvious to us, but are completely different to other cultures. This book made me really re-examine American food culture in a way Michael Pollan's diatribes have not.

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