What Is Your Actually Useful Baby Advice?
I have one mountain I'll die on, everything else is you do you.
Friday Thread: What Got You (Or a Friend) Through Postpartum?
Everyone in my house/extended family has been on pins and needles alllll week because… my baby sister is having HER first baby, like, any minute now as I type this. We are all so excited to meet this new little one!!! And I can’t wait to see my sister and her husband as parents — they are going to be so, so great. So I’ve been trying very hard throughout this experience not to default to being the bossy, know-it-all, big sister.
Yes, “bossy” is one of my factory settings (in relation to the entire world, not just my poor siblings). And I, ofc, have various strong opinions, loosely held, about pregnancy, birth, and babies. But my sister is almost 9 years younger than me, and I haven’t been in those trenches in (checks youngest kid) almost seven years. I also appreciate two things Anne Helen Petersen wrote this week about bad advice: “Parenting advice is often bad because kids are magnificently unique creatures and so are their caregivers.” And: “Just because I did something doesn’t mean it’s what other people should also do. Just because a strategy worked for me (with my various intersecting privileges) doesn’t mean it works for everyone.”
All I really know about having kids is that everyone has to navigate this huge life change on their own terms; that it’s hard in some universal ways but in a thousand more idiosyncratic ones. And if you’re visiting someone with a baby, you better bring good snacks, and wash your damn hands.
OK and I do have one very strong, very tightly held opinion, and I will die on this mountain forever.
