I’m not a “kid” person, basically never held a baby before we had our first this August.
As the child bearing person in this equation, I also did the most research on pregnancy, birth, subsequent baby stuff. (My partner did do some reading too, but not the same extent of feeling like he needed to figure it all out.)
One thing that’s interesting is that in many ways, even the pair of us who knew nothing about babies have pretty good instincts for what they need. We got some help from a post partum doula to show us baby care, since we figured you can’t learn all that from reading.
We did read some books. I tried to stay away from articles because they are incentivized to act like there’s conflict or “new” stuff to talk about to keep engaging readers. The most useful resource has been a private Reddit forum of other people who had babies the same month, so we can compare what’s worked for lots of people, what popular info seems totally wrong to lots of us, etc.
Kids aren’t easy, but they are not hard the same way our knowledge-worker jobs are to learn.
As the child bearing person in this equation, I also did the most research on pregnancy, birth, subsequent baby stuff. (My partner did do some reading too, but not the same extent of feeling like he needed to figure it all out.)
One thing that’s interesting is that in many ways, even the pair of us who knew nothing about babies have pretty good instincts for what they need. We got some help from a post partum doula to show us baby care, since we figured you can’t learn all that from reading.
We did read some books. I tried to stay away from articles because they are incentivized to act like there’s conflict or “new” stuff to talk about to keep engaging readers. The most useful resource has been a private Reddit forum of other people who had babies the same month, so we can compare what’s worked for lots of people, what popular info seems totally wrong to lots of us, etc.
Kids aren’t easy, but they are not hard the same way our knowledge-worker jobs are to learn.