239: First year for your newborn baby: The 7 ideas that really matter

Hi, I'm Emma, and I'm listening from the UK. We all want our children to lead fulfilled lives, but we're surrounded by conflicting information and clickbait headlines that leave us wondering what to do as parents. The Your Parenting Mojo podcast distills scientific research on parenting and child development into tools parents can actually use every day in their real lives with their real children. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a free infographic on the 13 reasons your child isn't listening to you and what to do about each one, just head on over to yourparentingmojo.com/subscribe, and pretty soon you're going to get tired of hearing my voice read this intro, so come and record one yourself at yourparentingmojo.com/recordtheintro.

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Around 18 months ago I posted in the free Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group asking what questions listeners have that they would like me to answer in an episode. Listener Roberta submitted this question:

Hello, my name is Roberta Pereira, and I'm in New York City. So as parents, we are faced with so many decisions about our children. And I'm wondering what decisions actually matter. So in terms of looking at the research, what are the things that are going to have the greatest impact on their lives?

A year ago I released the 1st of two episodes in this mini series. I dug into the ways we can understand what's really important as we raise our kids after they leave the first year of life. I want to briefly recap what we discussed in that episode about how much overall impact we can have on our children’s lives, and then we’ll spend our time today looking at the top 5 things that I think are really important for babies first year. So whether you’re expecting a child or you have one already under the age of 1, this episode is for you.

In our first episode on this topic we began by looking at the many times that the idea of what constitutes being a " good parent” has changed over the years. That's because the decisions we make in our parenting are ultimately about what we think it takes to be successful in our culture, as well as the culture we would like to try to create. So as our culture changes, we see advice to parents change as well- often completely reversing direction. Sometimes this happens because we gain new knowledge about how our bodies work, which is behind the American Academy of Pediatrics is reversal on advice to parents that young children should not eat peanuts, after finding that children who ate peanut butter had lower instances of peanut allergies. Sometimes these changes happen when organizations realize that nobody is following their advice. The American Academy of Pediatrics adjusted its screen time guidance upward after it realized almost nobody was following it's very strict guidelines. And of course co-sleeping with infants has become a highly contentious practice with some people saying that it promotes bonding, others saying that it's incredibly dangerous, and parents stuck in the middle trying to do their best for their baby and get some rest. Different policymakers will read different studies and reach different conclusions, which is why Australia promotes safe co-sleeping well the United States perceives it as inherently dangerous.

In the first episode on this topic we also spent a good deal of time looking at how much of our child's outcomes we might reasonably be able to affect. A huge meta analysis of over 2,700 publications including fourteen and a half million twin pairs and virtually all published twin studies of complex traits found that the average heritability of a particular trait is 49%, so that’s the amount we pass onto them through our genes. We also know that socioeconomic status makes a large contribution to children's outcomes. You don't have to be rich to give your child a good start in life, but if you live in a culture where there is little social support, money is used to create opportunities that would otherwise be created by being in bigger caregiving groups. And if you focus on acquiring more money to give your child better opportunities, it's possible that inequality will negate some of that work. After accounting for programs that redistribute income like Social Security, the United States has the second highest level of inequality among so-called developed countries behind only Chile.

Before income redistribution, the bottom 20% of Americans had 2.3% of all income, while the top 20% had 57.9% of that income. After income redistribution through taxes and social programs, the bottom’s 20% share rose to 9.3% of all income, while the top 20% share fell to 47.2%, which means that 20% of the people in the country have almost half of the income, even after you take welfare programs into account. Compared to other countries, U.S. tax and spending policy does relatively little to reduce inequality compared with its peers among countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD. We know that inequality has huge effects on social unrest, political polarization, health outcomes, higher crime rates, and a general decline in overall well-being. A study of 2,414 women found that 24% of the participants reported a level of depressive symptoms that warranted further evaluation for major depressive disorders. 69% of women report experiencing at least one type of trauma during their lifetime. Men are diagnosed with depression half as often as women, but almost four times as many men die by suicide as women, with White men accounting for 68% of suicide deaths in twenty twenty-two. When I talked with Doctor Nadine Burke Harris about adverse childhood experiences, we learned how we might have the perception that traumatic experiences mostly happen among poor families. Actually they happen in all families, but richer families tend to be better at covering them up and pretending they didn’t happen. Our culture isn’t very good at protecting any of us, and it can seem like money can protect us from negative impacts and to some extent it can, but only up to a point, and only with certain kinds of risks.

There are also the cultural messages that our children will absorb, and yes, this happens even when they’re infants. We learned in the episode on Parenting Beyond Pink and Blue that researchers can dress a baby up in pink clothes and study participants who don’t know the purpose of the study will coo: “Oh, what a pretty baby you are!”. When the SAME BABY is dressed in blue, participants will notice how handsome and strong ‘he’ is. Then we use more feelings words when we talk to girl babies, and talk about math concepts more with boy babies, like counting things that we see. All of these things add up, and set the stage for how we will interact with our kids as they get older and can remember more of our conversations. Our children don’t just absorb information from the world around us; we mediate it for them and confirm the messages they get from the world, or we teach them how to resist those messages.

In our last episode we also heard from Parent Jeannou, who was successful by all the usual metrics researchers use to measure success. She graduated from high school and college with good grades and became a lawyer and got the kind of corporate job that parents think about when they say they want their children to have a ‘good life.’ But when I first met Jeannou she was in full-on burnout, and took a long leave of absence from work to recover. I mentioned that she joined the Taming Your Triggers workshop to find new tools to help her deal with her children’s difficult behavior and she found what she called a “garage full of festering garbage” of difficult feelings and unmet needs. Some of the garbage came from the lack of support she had during the pandemic, and working in a job that didn’t fit with her values and working so many hours that she couldn’t be with her kids in the ways that she wanted. But it also went back to her own childhood. Her parents were good parents. They were successful by all measures that researchers look at. And they raised a successful-looking daughter…who was falling apart on the inside. We wrapped up the explanation part of the episode, before we got to the list of 5 things that really matter for older children, by saying that when we ask ‘what really matters;’ what makes a difference in a child’s outcomes, we’re really asking how we can raise children in alignment with our values. I think I said it pretty well in the last episode so I’m going to say it again here:

I know some of you will be listening to this and thinking: “But I DO want my child to do well in school and go to a good college and have a good career and be able to buy a house and get married and have children.” I hear that. And I also know that many of you want more than that for your children. I know I do. And if we want our children to feel fulfilled, and to be happy in themselves without needing a degree from a specific university, or a high-paying job in a specific field, or a huge house but just in being themselves, and if we want them to be in relationships where they feel truly equal to their partner, and to have an intrinsic sense of their own worth so they can sit still doing nothing and not feel guilty about it, and to have a deep sense of joy in life, and see the suffering and be able to cope with the suffering, and do work so hopefully there will be less suffering in the world and more joy for everyone, then I don’t think we can look to the old tools that were designed to get us academic success and a job and a house and a marriage to get us there. I 100% acknowledge that this is a value choice. If you value different things than I do, then your list of things that really matter will be completely different. But if the list of ideas that I value sounds a lot like what you want for your child, then I think there are some things you can do to make that happen.

But before we get there, here’s a non-exhaustive list of things that I don’t think matter enough to be worth worrying about for parents who are expecting a baby or who have one under the age of 1:

- What’s on your baby shower registry does not matter, unless it includes industrial strength laxatives if you’re bathing the baby and nipple shields if you plan to breastfeed. The brand of crib you have, whether you have Aden and Anais burp cloths or whatever is cool now that wasn’t cool a decade ago, the wipe warmers…most of that stuff doesn’t matter very much.

- It doesn’t matter how baby arrives in your arms, as long as that can be accomplished with as little trauma to everyone involved as possible.

- If baby is lucky enough to have their own room, it doesn’t really matter if it’s ready or not by the time they arrive as baby is likely to spend the first few months sleeping in the same room as you one way or another. I didn’t realize that before Carys was born.

- It doesn’t matter if you get the special black and white baby mobiles because infants can’t see color yet, and it doesn’t matter if you get the toy subscriptions that are supposedly timed to their developmental milestones or not. It’s unlikely that we would have survived as a species if our development was so dependent on being exposed to specific toys at specific times. Your baby is going to get just as much out of playing with simple things you have around the house as toys that you buy.

- It doesn’t matter if you’re partnered or not, if you find the relationship you’re in to be fulfilling, and if you have enough support if you’re a single parent.

- It doesn’t really matter if you or anyone else speaks to them in a second language, unless you and your family speak it regularly and plan to keep on using it after the infant phase because otherwise they’re going to forget it anyway.

- It doesn’t make any difference to their long-term outcomes if you do baby sign language with them – there’s actually research on that, to which I metaphorically screamed at my computer: THAT’S NOT THE POINT OF BABY SIGN LANGAUGE! The point of baby sign language is to make the period when the child has strong opinions about how they want to do things but doesn’t yet have the oral motor skills to produce words easier, so they can tell you about things that are important to them. So that may matter a lot to kids who have very strong ideas about how things should be done, but it doesn’t matter for their long-term outcomes or even their long-term sign language skills because they’re going to forget it all anyway if you stop using it when they start talking.

- For the most part, it doesn’t matter very much when your child hits developmental milestones. I want to spend a bit of time on this, because we looked at in the second of the two episodes on the Wonder Weeks, and I think it’s relevant here. If you follow a book or an app like the Wonder Weeks, you’ll probably know that they like to tell you what developmental milestones your child is approaching, and in the case of the Wonder Weeks, the authors state: “with each age-linked leap, we include a list of things that a baby could do for the first time at that earliest possible age.” Not all babies will do all skills that appear on a list; in the Wonder Weeks episode we looked at the example of Dr. Emmi Pikler’s work, which found that babies who aren’t propped into a sitting position tend to achieve the ‘sitting unassisted’ milestone WAY later than babies who are propped. That’s because if babies who aren’t propped up have to get into a sitting position by themselves, and it takes them a LOT longer to build up the strength to push themselves up than it does to just hold themselves up once they’ve already been sat up by an adult.

A baby who isn’t propped to sit isn’t experiencing any delay that really MATTERS. There’s also a LOT of variation in when different researchers say babies should be able to achieve different milestones, with one author saying that babies should be able to turn from their back to their side at 18 weeks, while another said this happens at 28 weeks. Estimates on when children will start to walk vary between 49 weeks and 70 weeks. And this is important because we’re balancing concerns about whether we can help our child’s development if we know they’re ABOUT to be able to do something, with how much we might worry if they CAN’T do something until later. Parents who are relatively advantaged and want to give their child the best possible start to life often want to know what change is COMING, so this is the Wonder Week is giving, so they can PROACTIVELY do everything they can to support baby’s development.

The milestones published by an organization like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control are looking to catch children who SHOULD have already passed a milestone and haven’t. It might seem obvious that of course we want to know what’s coming so we can support our baby most effectively, but if you spend time and energy worrying that your child hasn’t met a particular milestone yet when actually only a tiny proportion of babies do it at that age, you’re wasting that time and energy. Books and apps like Wonder Weeks will try to convince you that your input is CRITICAL to your baby passing the milestone, and preferably doing it on the early side. The Wonder Weeks book tells us that “after eight weeks, your baby may become bored if they always see, hear, smell, or taste the same old things. They crave variety. If they seem bored, keep them stimulated. Carry them around in your arms or move the position of their baby chair to give them different objects to look at.” But how do I know if an eight-week-old is bored? Does an eight-week-old get bored of milk? When the book says that “some babies will need a lot of time to complete their explorations, whereas other babies won’t,” how much time should I spend carrying my baby around? How many new objects do they need to look at? We have no idea.

Comparing your baby to other babies doesn’t usually help you, and it MAY end up hurting your baby. We have friends who have a son who is four days older than our daughter Carys. Both of this kid’s parents are super physical, and he is super physical too. He passed ALL of his physical milestones early, and I noticed that I felt really jealous of his parents. Carys wasn’t delayed in passing the milestones, but somehow I couldn’t get over the jealousy that I felt every time they posted an update on social media about what he was doing. They were just celebrating what their baby was doing, but I kept comparing them and wondering why mine was ‘behind.’ So while it doesn’t matter when your child meets their milestones as long as they’re roughly in alignment with the CDC’s guidelines, and remember these guidelines are based on when 75% of children have achieved the milestone, not when ALL babies should be able to do it, which means that 25% of babies won’t have passed the milestone by the age the CDC provides, it won’t make any difference whatsoever in your child’s outcomes when they pass them. The only reason it could matter is if there’s a bigger reason why they might not be getting to milestones roughly in alignment with other kids. It’s worth getting checked out if you think there might be a specific challenge that your child is having with mobility or language development or anything else. But for the most part, whether they’re in the first or the 90th percentile for hitting those milestones is irrelevant.

Nobody is going to ask when they enter kindergarten how old they were when they first rolled over. Nobody cares in middle school how old your child was when they learned to walk. You won’t write the age they said their first word on their college application if they go to college. But this is linked to an issue that DOES matter, which is number 7 on our list of things that I think DO matter for babies. This is that when we start comparing our child to other children, or to theoretical children who CAN pass their milestones by a certain date, we’re setting up a habit. A pattern of interacting with our child. And that pattern can create shame. To be clear, I’m not saying that if you – or I, for that matter – compared your baby with another baby when they were six months old that they’re doomed to a life of experiencing shame. Far from it. But when we start making these comparisons as a baby and we KEEP making them as the child gets older, and especially when we VERBALIZE those comparisons, we start to create the conditions that we know can arouse shame in a lot of people. So if you start by comparing the dates your baby rolls over, crawls, and walks, and then that progresses into thinking of this baby as ‘the grumpy one’ compared with your older child who’s ‘the sweet one,’ and when you try to potty train your baby early because your neighbor’s baby could pee on the potty at 12 months so yours should be able to as well, and we tell our child: You’re 18 months old. I’ve told you a million times not to hit me. You should be able to do what you’re told by now.” So we’re created a persona for our child that they will come to fulfil over time, and we’re comparing them with a sibling or the neighbor’s child, or to a theoretical child who ‘should’ be able to do what we say by now, that’s when we start getting in trouble.

To illustrate this, I’m going to ask you to bring someone to mind whom you think of as a good parent. It might be your own parent, if you were lucky, or your sibling, or a friend. Imagine that person’s child yelled at them one day, and how that person would handle it. Maybe in your mind they are always unflappably calm, always graceful, always ready with compassion no matter what their child says so just spend a second imagining that situation with that parent that you think of probably a good parent and their child. And now, how does YOUR parenting compare with what they do? The last time your child yelled at you, did you handle it as gracefully as the parent you’re thinking of would handle it? Or did you yell at your kids, and do things you knew weren’t aligned with your values, even though you’ve told yourself AND your kids that you won’t do that anymore? Now, how do you feel? Do you feel inspired and motivated? Do you want to work more on yelling less at your kids? Or do you feel some shame because I asked you to compare yourself with this great parent, and you don’t measure up? The same thing happens for our kids when we compare them with a sibling who can do the thing we’re asking, or the neighbor’s kid, or a theoretically ‘good’ kid who can do what we’re asking. When we compare ourselves to someone else and we see how we don’t measure up, we often feel shame. When we compare our children with other actual or theoretical children and they don’t measure up, they may feel shame. It won’t always happen, especially if you happen to land on an issue that they really don’t care about. You could criticize my golf swing all you want, but I won’t feel any shame about it. I know I suck at golf and I have no interest in being good at it. There is no part of my identity that is tied up in being a good golfer. If your identity is tied up in being a competent parent, that’s when you feel shame. And if your comparison tells your child that you don’t approve of them or love them and they crave your approval and love, when you threaten to withdraw that approval and love they may well feel shame. These comparisons are a habit that are ingrained in us by our culture, through our parents, our schools, and the media we consume. The grades we get in school compare our performance with everyone else’s. Commercials show us images of young, thin people with lots of money and no body hair and tell us we can BE more like them, or at least LOOK more like them, if we buy their product. Magazine articles tell us how to shape ourselves so we can be more like people who are successful. Hollywood has sold the whole world an image of what it means to be ‘successful.’ If we didn’t feel shame, we wouldn’t buy the product or the magazine or watch the movie. Somehow we believe that making the purchase will make us more like those successful people. Because this is all so ingrained in us, it’ll take work to do things differently. It might not matter if you compare your six-month-old baby with your friend’s baby but if you don’t see what’s happening and find ways to interrupt that pattern by the time they’re old enough to communicate verbally with you, then you may end up creating conditions that make it more likely that your child will experience shame. When instead you see the child that’s in front of you, and work to meet their needs, even if those are different from what ‘most kids their age’ seem to need, then your child will be off to a much better start than most of US received. So that’s the thing that I think is seventh on our list of things that really matter for babies.

The sixth most important thing that I think really matters is childcare. Episode 81 way back in twenty nineteen was on the topic of how to decide which daycare/preschool is right for your child, and as part of that I looked at WHETHER to sign up for daycare/preschool at all. Most of the evidence on the benefits of preschool looks at samples from families with low incomes, and often Black families, and compares the school readiness of children from these families who attended preschool with children who didn’t attend preschool. Because school is so heavily geared towards how White middle-class families and children interact with the world, it isn’t super surprising that children from low income and Black families are seen as “less well prepared.” In episode 65, on Why storytelling is so important for our children, we looked at Dr. James Paul Gee’s research on a 7-year-old Black girl whom he called L, who told a story in her class for show and tell. I read the whole story out in that episode so I’ll just read the first part of it here. So this is how it goes:

“Last yesterday, when my father in the morning and he and there was a hook on the top of the stairway and my father was picking me up and I got stuck on the hook up there. And I hadn’t had breakfast, he wouldn’t take me down until I finished all my breakfast because I didn’t like oatmeal either. And then my puppy came, he was asleep. And he was he was he tried to get up and he ripped my pants and he dropped the oatmeal all over him. And my father came and he said, Did you eat all the oatmeal? He said, Where’s the bowl? He said, I think the dog I said, I think the dog took it? Well, I think we’ll have to make another can. And so I didn’t leave till seven and I took the bus and my puppy, he always be following me.”

My reaction to the story was very similar to L’s own teacher’s reaction, and her teacher was also White, and interrupted L with questions that showed the teacher didn’t understand the story. The teacher deemed the story incoherent, disconnected, and rambling. And eventually L was sent, on the basis of stories like this one, to the school psychologist. Dr. Gee concludes: “We are thus faced with two questions. First, how could a 7-year-old have produced such a remarkable narrative? And second, how could she in producing it have nonetheless failed?” And then he goes on to spend sixteen pages doing an in-depth literary assessment of the marvelous narrative that L produced. So when ‘school readiness’ means producing a simple linear story with a beginning, a middle, and end, and enough background information that someone who didn’t participate in it, like a White teacher, can follow, then you can see how a Black child who has never been to preschool might not be deemed school-ready. It’s not because they aren’t capable of producing sophisticated stories, but because the stories aren’t recognized as sophisticated by the 80% of school teachers who are White. Rather than change schools to recognize the genius of multiple different communication styles, Black children are taught to communicate in a White style if they want to be deemed ‘successful.’

Because so much of the research takes this perspective, it’s hard to tease out whether there are any other benefits to preschool beyond preparing all children to act more like middle class White children. I worked with Evelyn Nichols, who’s the director of the Mighty Bambinis Forest Preschool in Marin County, not far from where I live. We used the research that there is available along with her experience running a respect-based, Reggio-Emilia inspired preschool for well over a decade to develop a preschool visit checklist. It has a series of questions to ask when you’re on a tour, as well as things you can look for to judge the quality of a setting. The categories we looked at included respectful, responsive caregiving, the program’s philosophy, the rhythm of the day, how the environment is set up to be the child’s ‘third teacher,’ continuity of care, because staff turnover is a key indicator that staff aren’t being treated well, which means children may not be treated well as well; relationship-building care, group sizes and child: teacher ratios, which are important in promoting relationships between young children and teachers, and whether the care is respectful of families’ situations. These are all the things that we see that matter about a childcare setting. If you go to the episodes page at your parenting mojo.com and enter 081 to find that episode and the free downloadable checklist that you can take on your own childcare and preschool tours. Of course you’re looking at cost as well, and with that taken into account, the questions will help you to judge whether each setting is aligned with your values for childcare so you can make the right decision for your child and your family. I know a lot of parents sign up for childcare because they’re working outside the home and they have no choice, but there are also a subset who aren’t in paid employment and who worry that their child won’t get enough socialization if they don’t enroll in childcare. There’s nothing in the research to indicate that if you enjoy being with your baby all the time and you get out and spend time with other people, that being in a formal childcare program offers anything superior to that. If you can use a BREAK and you know you’re a better parent when you’ve had time to yourself then in the absence of a culture where that care is provided by our communities, by all means, sign your child up for childcare if you can find a setting that fits with your values. Just know that your child probably isn’t missing out on anything important if you choose NOT to do that. So if your child is in childcare, the setting for that care is the sixth most important thing that can make an impact on a baby’s life in their first year.

The fifth most important idea if you have a partner is to think through is how you’re going to divide the workload of being a parent. You can start thinking about this even before you have the baby, which is something I NEVER did. So: who’s going to get up the baby in the middle of the night? If each of you gets leave from work, how will the arrangements change depending on who’s working and who isn’t? If you’re both working, will you alternate nights where you get up when baby wakes up? Will one of you take the 10pm-2am shift and the other the 3am onwards shift? Will one of you sleep with baby some nights and then switch off? Who will deal with researching nannies or childcare centers or thinking about who in your families can help? Who will submit any applications needed? Who will do the pick-ups and drop-offs? Who will research doctors and take baby for their well-child checkups? Who will be in charge of noticing that baby is growing and their old clothes don’t fit them anymore, and research and buy new clothes? Because each of those decisions helps set the stage for what will follow. When we’re the one who does all the research on the childcare situation, and we do all of the pick-ups and drop-offs, the childcare providers see us as the default parent, and they don’t call our partner. So when our kid gets an ear infection and the childcare provider wants the child to be picked up immediately, they call us and not our partner. It’s OUR day that gets interrupted; OUR work that gets put on hold, or we try to do it at 10pm after baby is finally asleep, or deadlines just slide. When we fill out the paperwork, whose name we put first matters. If we don’t specify “Call Dad when baby is ill,” they’ll call Mom. Because they’ve been trained by the same systems that have trained us to default to Mom being the primary caregiver, they expect Mom to be their primary point of interaction. I’ve heard of families who put down Dad’s name and number as the primary point of contact, and Dad does all pick-ups and drop offs, and STILL the director calls Mom when the child is sick, sometimes even stating: “The child isn’t feeling well so I thought they would want their Mommy.”

Same goes for the doctor. If your phone number is listed first, they’ll call YOU with updates. If only you know how to find the medical record card, and how to access the online booking system to book appointments and you communicate with the doctor, you’re going to end up doing ALL of the doctor’s visits and communication. If you start off noticing that baby is growing and needs new clothes then your partner is probably going to assume that you’re going to keep doing that. Even if you’ve had an equal relationship up to this point, things are GOING to change after baby is here. Because women more often hold jobs that don’t pay as well as men, when someone has to deal with appointments and pick-ups and drop offs and buying clothes and all the rest of it, it’s easy to assume it should be the person earning less money, because if the person who earns more money loses their job then the family is going to be in a more difficult spot. But is that the choice that makes the most sense for YOUR relationship? Because you get to define that. You get to say that even though one person earns more money than the other, that you value your work equally, so you will take on childcare work equally as well. If you don’t have that conversation, then societal pressures will push you toward an outcome where Mom in a cis-het relationship takes on the vast majority of the childcare work. I’m sure I would have fallen into this pattern too, and two main things saved me. The first is that I was NOT the person who wanted to have the baby, which is unusual in a cis-het relationship. My husband assumed that I would do all drop-offs and pick-ups because he was commuting at the time and I worked from home. “I don’t have time to do the childcare runs, and besides, you’re the one who wanted this baby.” I got to say: “There is one drop off and one pick-up every day, and you’re doing one of them because YOU wanted to have this baby.” (If I’d had more knowledge at the time I might have been able to articulate something about fairness and equality and sharing the work of having the baby but I didn’t, so I couldn’t.)

The other major factor I had working in my favor is that I really don’t care what our house looks like. I grew up on a small farm, and my stepmother bred dogs, so we would have around 25 dogs not including puppies at any one time. Some of them would stay in the house overnight, and they would inevitably poop on the floor. And my stepmum often didn’t get out of bed until 10am so she made up a rule that the first person to see the dog crap on the floor had to clean it up, knowing that she would not usually be the first person to see it in the mornings. You can imagine that all the kids got pretty good at “not seeing” dog crap on the floor. Some people might go 180 degrees the other direction and say: “I NEVER want my kid to grow up like I did so my house is going to be PERFECTLY tidy at all times,” but that’s not me. I just don’t care if there’s stuff all over the floor, or crumbs everywhere, or a ring of dirt in the bathtub. My husband grew up in a house where kids were not allowed to put fingerprints on the glass coffee table, so the usual dynamic in a cis-het relationship is reversed for us. Usually it’s the woman who ‘sees the dirt’ and cleans until some societally accepted definition of cleanliness is reached, and the man who says “I just don’t see it.” It’s less that I don’t see the dirt; it’s more that I just don’t really care about it that much. A dirty or clean house doesn’t have any moral value to me. I don’t think less of you if you have a dirty house, and I don’t think you’re better if you have a clean house. Those things are disconnected in my mind. So those two things – that I’m not the person who wanted the child, and I don’t see dirt(don’t care much about the dirt), gave me a lot of leverage in the early days when we were figuring out who was doing what in the household – and STILL I ended up doing the vast majority of the work. When we looked at who was doing what when Carys was about three, we found that I was doing about 90% of the tasks that it took to run the household, at the time I was working in consulting and earning more than him, and also building the podcast and the early days of the business. So if you don’t have those levers, and you aren’t aware that all of the cultural messages around you are likely to push you in one direction, even if your relationship was pretty equal before you had a child. You’re going to get pushed that way. You have to be aware of it and also be willing to talk about it. Ideally, if you are in a cis-het partnership, it’s going to be the husband who says: “Hey, let’s talk about how we’re going to make sure our workload is distributed evenly.” In reality, it’s usually the wife who feels frustration, anger, resentment that she’s doing most of the work, and she’s not only has to convince the husband to do more of the work, but to even have the conversation about doing the work. She has to do the research on why she feels so frustrated, angry, and resentful, figure out how much of that is hers to own and do the work on healing that piece, and research ways to share the work more equally, and figure out how to approach him with it in just the right way, using just the right language, at just the right time so he’ll be receptive to it. So if we want things to be different from that, if we don’t want to feel that frustration, anger, resentment we know impacts baby’s development we have to start thinking about it NOW. If baby isn’t here yet, it isn’t too early. If everything seems fine in your relationship right now, it isn’t too early.

The fourth most important factor is to start thinking about discipline. I know it can be really hard to do when the child isn’t even here yet, or when baby is still young, but those days will be here before you know it. I actually started thinking about discipline super early – I clearly remember being in the shower when Carys was about four months old, and thinking: how am I going to discipline her without being the parent that she hates? My husband Alvin is objectively much more ‘fun’ than I am, and so I assumed he would be the preferred parent who always says ‘yes’ and got to do all the fun stuff with her, and I’d be the disciplinarian who came in and mopped up all the crap in the background. Little did I know about how much our childhood experiences would come out in our parenting. We were both raised by parents who expected kids to do what they were told when they were told, and we’ve had to go through quite a shift to leave that mindset behind. I went through it first as I learned about respectful parenting and Resources for Infant Educarers or RIE, only a week or two after that morning in the shower actually. Some friends of ours were visiting from out of town with their toddler, and he went running down our hallway towards our bedroom. His mom called down to him: “Jack, please don’t go in the bedroom. You can go in the nursery if you want, or come back here to the living room.” Jack stopped on the threshold of our bedroom, he peeked inside, and then turned back and ran to the living room. I was stunned. I looked at her and said: “How did you do that?” She recommended that I read Magda Gerber’s book Your Self-Confident Baby, which was what ended up launching my interest in parenting. Before that I hadn’t read any books on parenting – I don’t think I even knew there WERE books on parenting. Reading Your Self-Confident Baby was a revelation – it opened up the possibility that babies are capable beings who can understand us so much earlier than we might have thought. I found a peer-reviewed paper showing that if you tell babies “I’m going to pick you up now” before you do it, by around 3 months they will stiffen their neck in preparation for you to do it. If you want to learn more about RIE I did two episodes on this a while ago – one on what RIE is, and the other looking at the scientific evidence backing up key principles of RIE. Those are linked on the episode page for this episode if you want to dig deeper into them.

In some ways it can be hard to know how you’ll handle discipline until you’re in it. If you’d asked me: “What will you do if Carys hits you?” when she was born, I’d have said: “I’ll say “Please don’t hit me.” If you’d said “what if she keeps doing it?” I would have said: “Uhhh I don’t know..”

But what I’ve seen through working with thousands of parents is ‘how we discipline the kids’ is an issue that can end up dividing us. In a cis-het relationship, it’s usually the mother who does the research on parenting methods, because that’s caregiving work that isn’t valued in our culture, so it’s considered ‘beneath’ a man’s attention and notice. We might tell ourselves it’s just because we’re interested and our partner isn’t, but when there are millions of women who are the ones who are just interested in understanding their kid than the millions of men they’re partnered with, it stops being about our individual preferences and starts being about the ways we’re taught to show up in our families. So when mothers are the ones doing the research and working to heal from the hurts they’ve experienced so they can show up differently for their kids, and men just say “I want parent the way I want without having to think about what I do and say,’ or when they “don’t have time” to learn about child development, and when MILLIONS of men make the same choice it isn’t just a choice; it’s what our culture has taught us is the appropriate thing to do.

So if you’re a female-identifying parent listening to this and thinking: “I don’t know how I’m going to discipline; I’d better start reading about that,” then that’s part of this cultural process. If you send this episode to your male-identifying partner and he says: “I don’t have time to think about discipline” or “I guess I’ll just do what my parents did because I turned out OK” or “you could do the reading if you want to; you’re the one who wanted kids, after all…” then that’s cultural messages telling us what’s our role and what’s his role.

So if you’re parenting alone you can think this through yourself, or if your co-parent IS willing to engage then you can work through it with them, and ask: what WILL we do when our child does something we don’t want them to do? What it seems like all of our friends kids can say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ at appropriate times and use cutlery at the dinner table and say “May I please be excused?” before leaving, will we discipline our kids if they DON’T do that? One tool we can use to think this through is to imagine the child saying: “But why does it have to be done like that?, even before they’re old enough to ask it. Parents of young kids often struggle to get their kids to sit at the dinner table until they’ve finished eating. When we imagine the kid asking: “But why do I have to stay at the table,” we might find that we come up short. If their hands are reasonably clean, and we can meet our need for connection with them if they’re three feet away from the table just as much as if they’re sitting AT the table, why do we have to require them to sit? My daughter often gets up and swings on her hammock at various points during her meal to get some wiggles out before she comes and sits back down again. Because I have the mental flexibility to see that her getting up doesn’t impede my ability to meet my real needs, even if it isn’t what theoretical good parents would do, then I find that I don’t have to use discipline. An even earlier struggle that happens in the first year is preventing the child from throwing food on the floor. We can often interpret that as a signal that the child is done eating, or they want our attention, if we’ve been talking with someone else or busy with something else. That’s the kind of situation where baby sign language can be super helpful! If the child can say “All done,” then they don’t have to throw food on the floor to get us to notice that they’re done. If neither of those things seems to be happening for the child and we can’t figure out why they’re throwing food, could we put an old shower curtain under their chair so our need for ease in cleaning up is met? So whether or not we think we can have the flexibility to do that is something that many parents would be better off figuring out sooner rather than later, because disagreements over discipline is one of the biggest sources of frustration, anger, and resentment in partnered couples’ relationships. The sooner you realize that one of you wants the kids to toe the line and that doesn’t sit right with the other one, and take steps to start addressing that, the better off you and your kids are going to be. If you were to spend baby’s first year working on THAT, then you’d be in a way better state by the time you actually need it.

The third most important idea that matters for babies is have a plan for at least some of the approaches you want to use to address the challenges you’ll come to face in baby’s first year. I don’t know about you, but I spent weeks and weeks thinking about my birth plan, and drafting multiple iterations of it – I imagine because it seemed like something I could control. We do have one extra bedroom in our house so I painted that as the nursery, and I made some bookshelves. We got a crib from a friend and a huge garbage bag full of infant clothes from a friend who was done with them. We were lucky enough to have what we physically needed, and I figured the first year would be the hardest because all she would be able to do would be eat and poop and cry, but after that things would get easier and we would figure it out as we went. I had absolutely no idea that I didn’t know what I didn’t know, as Donald Rumsfeld might once have said. I didn’t know we wouldn’t use her bedroom for the first four months because she would be sleeping in our room. I didn’t know anything about attachment relationships, or how to create them, or especially how to create them without giving *everything* of myself to my daughter. I didn’t know that babies experience our relationship primarily through touch in the early days, so how I touched her during a diaper change was just as important, if not more important, than how I played with her. I wish I’d known to consider these things before she was born, instead of spending so much time worrying about her birth plan.

Carys was a first and only child, but one of the biggest things I see parents worried about before baby is born is how the older sibling will react to the new baby. They often post in online communities asking about book recommendations to introduce the idea of a new baby and while those can be helpful, what’s far more important is what happens in the day-to-day after baby is here. When the older sibling is used to getting whatever they want when they want it and suddenly they have to wait for everything, and they used to get daily play time with you and now they don’t, and perhaps you’re getting more serious about sleep training them, or weaning them, or putting them in childcare so you can have more time with the baby, and they feel the separation. They might even say things like: “I wish we didn’t have the baby,” or “I wish we could throw the baby away,” and the books you read to your child don’t talk about what to do about THAT. In those moments, many parents respond with some version of: “But you LOVE being a big sibling!” or “Baby can’t help it; they’re new, and you’re already so much older.” It’s possible that the child is feeling very ambivalent about being an older sibling – they MIGHT love the new baby, and still feel frustrated and angry about the change in their role in the family. They might long for the time when they were the little one who got everything they wanted. What’s most important in these moments is that we truly try to hear what the older sibling is experiencing. If we’re already feeling panicked about their relationship, and we’re catastrophizing about how they’re going to have a terrible relationship as adults because of what’s happening now, the most helpful thing we can do is to say something like this to our older child: “I can hear that you’re having a hard time right now. It isn’t easy being a big sibling, is it? I bet you miss the days when it was just us, and we knew how to work together pretty well, huh? And now it must seem like I never have time to do the things you want to do when you want to do them, is that right? I hear you. It’s hard being a parent of two kids as well. I’ve never done anything like that before either. I’m figuring it out as I go as well. Would you like a hug? Now, what do you think would help when baby is screaming for a diaper change? Would you like it if I gave you a hug first, so baby has to wait just a little bit, and then I go to baby?” How different would it feel to receive THAT kind of message from your mother? From your parent? And we won’t know how to that if we don’t think in advance about the kind of approaches that we want to use with our children.

This is connected to the second most important thing we can work on is learning how to see other people’s behavior as an expression of their needs. So often, other people’s behavior can seem inexplicable to us. To me, my daughter’s needs have always been relatively easy to understand. Young children’s primary needs tend to be for connection with us, once they learn the meaning of the word ‘no,’ they’ve realized that they also have a need for autonomy – which means making meaningful decisions about their own bodies themselves. For kids with sensory issues, sensory comfort is pretty much always up there at the top. In my book Parenting Beyond Power I refer to those as ‘cherry’ needs – they’re the needs at the very top of a delicious cupcake that we pick off first. Under that are the 3-5 needs that come up next most often for the person. That’s the frosting layer for a young child these are often things like joy, play, and movement, with food and rest making an appearance as well. That’s the frosting layer and underneath, are the other 40 or so things that might be possible in the needs that make up the cake itself.

Your work is to look for the patterns that will help you understand what need is most relevant in the particular moment. So when your child starts jumping on the couch, are they doing it because they need joy, play, and movement? If so, and you don’t want them to jump on the couch because it might break, you could redirect them to the bed if it’s more solid, or perhaps time them as they run up and down the street. But if they’re jumping on the couch to get your attention because you’ve been apart all day, suggesting that they move to another room is probably not going to be successful. If you have needs for peace, ease, and calm, then you might suggest that you read a story to your child, or have a hug. When their need for connection is met, they won’t do things that they know annoy you in a bid for connection.

The examples are more obvious when the child is older, but you can also imagine a child toward the end of their first year whom you’ve told not to stick their fingers in an electrical outlet 100 times already. It’s definitely possible that an eight-month-old might not fully remember that you’ve told them not to do it. Then once they REMEMBER, they have to develop the self-control to not do what you’ve told them to do, which comes in stages and not all at once. Once they can talk, you might even hear them telling themselves not to do the thing, before they internalize that voice. They’ll be better able to remember and access the instruction when they’re well-regulated, so they’ve had enough rest, they aren’t hungry, they haven’t had a sibling poking at them all morning, you haven’t said ‘no’ to them 30 times already in the last hour, and so on. So there will be times when they DO remember, and times when they don’t. I know as a parent we tend to think: “But I’ve told you 100 times already, and you stayed away from it yesterday, so why can’t you just do it today as well?” And this is why that happens– because their capacity is different on different days, just like ours is too.

And the example of a child jumping on the couch to get your attention is definitely relevant to babies who do things like pulling our hair and grabbing our glasses. Of course there are times when they’re doing it because they’re curious about your hair or glasses, and there are also times when they’re trying to get our attention so they can meet a need for connection. Your pattern-seeking abilities are going to help you to tease that out – so if you’ve been apart from your child all day, you could probably hypothesize that they have a need for connection.

It turns out that we can use these tools with our partners as well, and with other people in your lives! So when your partner is doing things you find irritating, there’s a reason for that – they’re doing it to meet a need. I can’t tell you how common it is for one partner to pick a fight with the other because they have a need for connection. Because we don’t know how to identify our needs, we end up throwing spaghetti at the wall picking random strategies that we think will help us, and very often they not only don’t help us, but they create disconnection. We may pick fights because we see how disengaged our partner is, and we worry that we’re losing them. The fear of losing our parents’ love and affection was so terrifying in childhood, and our partner’s disengagement reminds us of that. We sometimes pick fights with them as a way of getting them to engage, because having them engaged and yelling at us is better than having them disengaged. (And you might hold that little nugget in the back of your mind as well, when it seems like your child starts doing things deliberately to provoke you…they may be trying to regain connection with you.)

So when your partner does something you find irritating or just mystifying, you might ask: what need are they trying to meet by doing this? Yes, it’s definitely true that some of the reason that male partners, particularly, disengage from caregiving tasks is because they don’t think they should have to do it, as we’ve mentioned. Some of the reason that happens is because where we do get leave from work, women usually get more of it than men. So in a cis-het relationship, the mom is spending more time with baby and comes to learn a bit more about what baby’s cries mean, and how baby likes to have their diaper done, and what toys they like to play with. Especially if Dad is working and mom is the one who is getting up with baby in the night, mom becomes more able to settle baby down again. There CAN be a complex interplay of what’s known as weaponized incompetence at play here as well, where Dad becomes markedly less able at doing things at home than he is at work. This drove me absolutely batty when Carys went through her 4 month sleep regression, because until that point we had been able to put her down pretty easily, and she would soothe herself to sleep. All of a sudden she would scream bloody murder if we didn’t hold her and bounce her for half an hour while she settled, and then ease her gently into the crib, slide our hands silently out from under her, and sneak out of her room avoiding the squeaky floorboards. My in-laws were staying with us at the time, and Grandpa could put Carys down successfully. I did it successfully. And when my husband would ‘try,’ he would bounce her up and down a dozen times, put her down not roughly, but definitely not gently and definitely not silently in her crib, and he would walk out as she was already crying saying: “I can’t do it.” I knew in that moment that he was doing it on purpose, and I even told him that at the time, which he denied. I didn’t know the term ‘weaponized incompetence’ at the time, but that’s what he was doing. So why was he doing it? Most likely it was a need for ease. It was easier to have me and Grandpa take care of it than for him to do it. I have to speculate, because when I mention it now it’s like he doesn’t remember it happening.

The things I most remember from his paternity leave were that he would cheerfully bring me anything that I asked for, and then he would either disappear for hours on end to do long training rides for a century ride that we’d done together the year before, or he’d be watching Game of Thrones or the Tour de France. Even now, every year when the cycling race comes on the TV I get flashbacks to that period a decade ago. He had needs for movement, fun, excitement, and joy in both the training rides and the long ride at the end of it.

Those needs are absolutely valid, and he deserved to have them met. But here’s the thing I didn’t understand at the time, and it’s the number one most important idea in what matters to babies: I didn’t know that I had needs, and that I deserved to have my needs met too. In fact, I’d basically sold myself to him as a person who didn’t really have needs. I used the words ‘low-maintenance,’ to differentiate me from the ‘high-maintenance’ women that I looked down on. I told him he didn’t have to second-guess me – that if I said I didn’t want flowers for Valentine’s Day that I mean I actually didn’t want flowers for Valentine’s Day, and it wasn’t a secret code that he had to read into and he’d be in it up to his neck if he didn’t produce flowers on Valentine’s Day. I meant it about the flowers. But I actually DID have other needs. I did have needs for support and collaboration and equity in our relationship. Because I didn’t know I had needs or what they were, I’d never articulated those to him. Somehow, a good chunk of my needs had been met earlier in our relationship, which is sort of a miracle if you think about it when you don’t even know what your needs ARE. But after Carys was born and things started shifting my needs were no longer being met, and I couldn’t fully see why that was happening.

If I’d been able to see my needs earlier…certainly by the time Carys was born, and even before then, it’s hard to imagine how much different the last decade would have been. I might have been able to advocate for my needs in a way that I really wasn’t able to. I could have suggested that he make sure he has someone who can come over and visit or be on call to come over quickly if I need help, when he’s two hours by bike away from me. As it was, she would be settled when he left and there was really no reason to say he couldn’t go…but I could never know if she’d be screaming at some point in the next four hours.

There are some things we just CAN’T know until we actually get into them. I don’t think we can really know what will trigger us until it actually happens. If I’d known how much all of this was going to end up shaping me as a parent, I definitely would have tried to access therapy to process the ways that my needs weren’t met in my family of origin, which would also have set me up to have fewer triggers as a parent but even then, I’m sure there still would have been topics that I just couldn’t have known about until they happened. You don’t always know you’re going to be triggered by your kids asking for help brushing their teeth because you were never allowed to ask for help and actually you were responsible for getting your younger siblings ready for the day. But if you know what it means to have needs for ease, and collaboration, and communication with your partner, you’re going to be much better placed not to get into the cycle of frustration, anger, and resentment that happens when our needs routinely aren’t met. It won’t fix all of your problems, but it will go a LONG way. When you know that other people’s behavior comes from their needs, and that your behavior comes from YOUR needs, you’re so much better able to understand difficult situations with your child, your partner, your parents, your in-laws, and everyone else in your life. To me, being able to show up in the world with that understanding and from that perspective shapes the person that your child will become to a far greater extent than anything I had considered before Carys was born, and that you might be considering if you’re expecting, or have considered if your baby is already here.

I hope this episode has helped you if you’re expecting a baby or have one under the age of 1. If yours is already heading up towards their first birthday you might also want to look at Q&A Episode #5, What Really Matters in Parenting Part 1, where I looked at what I think matters for kids older than 1. And if you’d like to submit your own question for me to answer, you can do that at yourparentingmojo.com/question.

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