The Birth Partner
Fully updated and revised, this guide covers the time from the last few weeksof pregnancy through the early postpartum period. Includes new information onwater birth, labor aids, and epidural anesthesia. 35 illustrations.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
3mentions
3people
2023–2024years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Children and their circumstances are so different that it's kind of easy to find yourself in a situation where no one knows what to do. Like everything that matters experience is the only real teacher. Keep trying.
If you can talk to people from your parents' generation that had children. Everyone has a story or a skill to share that helps make it all make more sense.
If you can afford to hire professionals they are generally more helpful than books. Doctors obviously are good to consult. Post partum doulas have lots of random knowledge that they can diffuse to you while they help out around the house. If you are having feeding issues OTs and lactation consultants can be quite useful.
Making friends with new parents will allow you to learn together.
Penny Simkin's book "The Birth Partner" is mostly about birth but had helpful ideas on sleep rotations and early feeding.
Random but I found this less wrong thread helpful for working through antivax ideas in good faith: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oFXXfP88nJrseeoMD/the-litera.... Particularly Lao Mein's comment. It is a very difficult topic to deal with head on since biology is so complicated and the surrounding discourse is all poison.
- Howdy! Our baby girl is one month old tomorrow. Three books that really helped me:
The Birth Partner by Penny Simkin - a handbook for all things labor and delivery, wonderful reference, and very cheap to get secondhand
Cribsheet by Emily Oster - data driven early childhood decisions. Super helpful from one month to 18 months.
Bringing Up Bébé by Pamela Druckerman - skip the book and read the 100 point appendix for max bang for least time invested (though I found it an enjoyable read)
Things no book told me:
* infants have no circadian rhythms for the first month or two, so you and your partner are largely in survival mode. Do what you can to help your partner get some sleep. We’ve found shift sleeping to be very helpful.
* Consider cooking and freezing a bunch of food a few weeks before your due date. Being able to heat up some pasta sauce or a burrito when you’re insane from sleep dep is a godsend.
Good luck. Everyone will want to tell you about the hard parts. No one can tell you about the rewards, and they are fabulous. I love being a dad and I hope you do too.
Edit: if it’s within your means, and you’re at all antsy about labor and delivery, a doula is a wonderful resource for you during delivery. Helps get the laboring partner through, and a good support for the other partner.
- Congrats!
I became a dad 17 months ago. I would do both 1 & 2 if possible, and 3 if you feel like it. Total time cost is less than a weekend.
1. The Birth Partner - https://www.pennysimkin.com/shop/the-birth-partner-5th-editi...
You can get by just skipping to the yellow-highlighted pages. They're 1-2 page How To's or summaries. Like a checklist of the stuff to put in your Go Bag.
2. Talk to different types of people about parenting and make notes about what's most important to you.
Don't leave out older people. Despite the mass amount of new literature about how to raise kids, being a parent hasn't changed that much in 2 generations.
3. Expecting Better - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/310896/expecting-be...
Easy to skip to just the chapters you want to learn about. E.g. if you end up needing/wanting genetic testing, you could read that chapter and nothing else.
