August 2023

My wife and I were fortunate to have a baby daughter that we named Ada this year and I asked myself, “Do babies come with a manual?” It turns out they don’t, so I talked to about a dozen parents and read some 20-30 books and articles (listed at the end) to prepare. Here are some early lessons, things I found most helpful:

-While every baby is different and has unique needs, all babies go through roughly 10 developmental stages in the first 18 months. It’s the period of the most rapid growth, and knowing what to expect at each stage and what support to give is quite helpful. Some call these the 10 “wonder weeks” where babies can be unusually fussy, but if you realize it is part of their biological development and what the challenges are, it can be fun to watch them. While life from age 2 to 25 has developmental stages too, they are not as intense and condensed as birth to 18 months.

-Attachment theory is an important mental model. Babies need a parent they can trust to take care of their needs, so children who have loving, caring, and consistently involved parents thrive in mind and body (larger brains, more emotional stability, better physical health, etc). The first 18 to 24 months are the most important, and babies need people to touch them, talk/sing/read to them, swing them and laugh with them, massage them, stroke their cheeks, and generally be wooed, loved, soothed, and snuggled. This shouldn’t be 24-7, but consistent every day. Monotropy is likely for real and moms are the most important caregivers, followed by dads, grandparents, other family, and then the community.

–Much of parenting advice and tips are cultural and regional. People in the coastal US do things differently than Middle America, who may it different than Asian and Chinese parents, French or Spanish parents, Peruvian tribal parents, Mozambiquan villagers, etc. And that’s fine and so it’s not worth stressing about many differences. I think there’s much to learn about and from many cultures and you can knit together the practices you find that resonate the most with you. As an example, American babies often don’t sleep through the night till months 3 to 6, and aren’t potty trained till years 2 through 4, while French babies start sleeping through the night (12am to 5am) by weeks 4 to 8, and many Asian babies are potty trained by months 9 to 14. American babies are often sleeping alone by month 6, whereas tribal Peruvians think that’s unnatural and may sleep with their kids till they are 8 years old.

-There are many philosophies to choose from, but I particularly like the RIE philosophy of Emmi Pickler and Magda Gerber, whose principles include: trust in babies/kids to be an initiator, explorer, and self-learner; environments that are physically safe, cognitively challenging, and emotionally nurturing; time for uninterrupted play; freedom to explore and interact with other infants, and even safe animals; the involvement of the baby/child in caregiving activities by talking to them and explaining what is happening, as an active participant, almost as if they were rational beings (treat them the way you expect them to eventually develop into); sensitive, careful, focused observation of a child to understand needs (put down the phone and engage in meditative observation); consistency and clearly defined limits and expectations to develop discipline (know when to firmly say “no”); giving a child predictability, but not entertainment (letting them get bored); encouraging struggle and problem solving (letting some crying happen), but knowing when to step in.

-Newborns don’t need anything in the first month – no schedules, no plans or programs, no stuff – just off-the-grid living (no other commitments) to meet basic needs. But after that first month or so, a schedule and “cadre”/framework are helpful to get them to eat and sleep regularly, and establishing healthy patterns around the developmental stages is quite important. This includes some tradeoffs with the parents’ happiness vs the baby’s (moms and dads are equally important when raising a baby), and a lot of it is leaning into the developmental stage to give sensory experiences, motor and cognitive skills, and more to the kid.

– You can sing, read to, play games with, dance with, show paintings and photos, and do a bunch of stuff with a newborn and through the first year. Babies like all the activity and sensory impressions when they are awake and alert. Reading early before they understand language and can barely make out simple visuals is actually quite important to build the habit over time, and their attention does increase if you gamify it with talking about pictures, doing voices, singing the text, cuddle and read with emotion, ask and answer questions, and more.

-The five Rs and five Ss work as tools. The five Rs of early education are reading together daily as a fun way to play; rhyming via playing, talking, singing, and cuddling; using routines for meals, play, and rest; using rewards for daily successes (putting on diapers, bathing, etc); fostering a relationship that is nurturing, reciprocal, purposeful, and lasting. The five Ss are to calm the baby down: swaddling; side/stomach position (with supervision); shushing or grey noise; swinging gently; sucking on a pacifier. It takes some time to develop your intuition on their specific needs, but I allow the baby to whimper, selectively intervene when she cries, and always intervene when she shrieks (I try to avoid her getting there).

-Getting sleep is crucial, and it takes commitment and planning to get there. Tips are: make sleeping arrangments comfortable (mattress, temperature 65-68 degrees is ideal, lights, pillows); allow light into the baby’s daytime room but keep nighttime dark; guide the baby into a sleep schedule; take naps; enlist others to help while you take a nap; don’t look at the clock when in bed; avoid caffeine/nicotine/alcohol for 6 hours before sleep, exercising for 3 hours before, or screentime for 1 hour; sleep with your baby in the room of at least 1 parent for 6 months (but it’s ok to sleep apart); prefill feed bottles before bedtime so it’s easy; use yellow and orange lights in the house, esp at night, and block other lights and especially annoying digital lights and blue light.

-Wearing your baby beats strollers – babies stay content longer and it helps them with gas exchange, they trust parents more, they like seeing their parent’s face, and they see and learn from what you are doing.

– The easiest time to travel with young kids is 4 months to roughly 14 months, after they get their shots and early immune system, to when they become a toddler and tougher to deal with. Many parents struggle from month 14 or so till after toddlerdom around ages 3 to 4. Young babies travel well, especially if you go to and stay in one place, bring a minimum of things, fly direct, and get travel insurance.

– Dads can do a lot: encourage and assist moms; spend time with the baby; baby dates; diaper changes; feedings (letting mom sleep); baby massages; household chores and meals. It’s unlikely dads ever get to 50/50 workload sharing at this age, but aiming to get there is a decent goal.

-Postpartum depression can happen to both moms and dads and is common. An emotional breakdown for moms in the first 2 weeks is quite common (esp the stress of 24-7 feedings and care, before moms can get sleep). Many American women hate their partners in their first 2 years, and most marriages suffer. All this is normal.

-Screen time is bad for infants, but some media is helpful. Some simple rules are: no screens in the kid’s bedroom or car; turn off TVs and screens completely when playing with babies; playing audiobooks and nurturing music (classical, jazz, nursery rhymes) is helpful; letting kids play with a picture book is edifying.

-Get out of the house into nature – it helps improve the baby’s vision, provides vitamin D, helps with sleep patterns, offers clean air, gets kids standing and moving; decreases stress. Even bad weather is fine if you have gear. Babies can also play in the dirt and with pets after 6 to 8 weeks, and it’s great for their immune systems. Newborns and children who grow up on farms have lower allergy and asthma rates, a phenomenon attributed to their regular exposure to microorganisms present in farm soil. Infants who grew up in homes with mouse and cat dander and cockroach droppings in the first year of life had lower rates of wheezing at age 3, compared with children not exposed to these allergens soon after birth. The protective effect, moreover, was additive, the researchers found, with infants exposed to all three allergens having lower risk than those exposed to one, two, or none of the allergens.

-Telling a baby or child to wait is fine. Your needs matter also, like using the restroom can be more important than their cries (it depends). Small acts of naughtiness (“betises”) are fine, but you need structure (“cadre”) and rules for bigger stuff.

-Some neat French ideas/words for kids: “doucement” to do things in a careful, controlled, mindful way; “complicité” to develop mutual understanding by treating babies are rational, participatory beings that you want them to grow into being; “éveillé” to get a baby to be alert and awakened, and “sage” to be wise/calm/good; limits and saying “non” to avoid an “enfant roi”; using “les gros yeux” (big eyes) to assert authority when a kid misbehaves (talk less, stare and emote more); “profiter” to enjoy the moment and be more spontaneous; “le pause” before jumping in to fix stuff – basically take time to observe and intuit, and not be too hasty (unless it’s an extreme/obvious danger).

-Brain development starts in pre-natal stage, but some easy things to do with a baby are: encourage the desire to explore; teach self-control and self-soothing; encourage creativity and play; go all in on verbal communication even when they can’t speak back (like you’re a radio announcer for a sports game); offer and interpret non-verbal communication; do a series of age and development appropriate activities with them as games (see Altmann and Engelmann).

Books – Age 0 to 2

• Gerber, Your Self-Confident Baby: How to Encourage Your Child’s Natural Abilities — From the Very Start
• Hamilton, 7 Secrets of the Newborn
• Altmann, Caring for your Baby and Young Child (7th Edition), American Association of Pediatrics
• Cook and Klaas, The Mayo Clinic Guide to Your Baby’s First Years (2nd Edition)
• Vanderijt, The wonder weeks: a stress-free guide to your baby’s behavior
• Druckerman, Bringing up Bébé
• Oster, Cribsheet
• Karl, The Happiest Baby on the Block
• Giardano, The Baby Sleep Solution (also see this)
• Engelmann, Give your Child a Superior Mind
• Medina, Brain Rules for Baby
• Earl Woods, Training a Tiger
• Wojcicki, How to Raise Successful People: Simple Lessons for Radical Results
• Polgar, Bring up a Genius
• Terman and Cox, Genetic studies of genius: Volume II. The Early Mental Traits of Three Hundred Geniuses 
• Mischel, The Marshmallow Effect
• Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby; The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind; The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children
• Davies, The Montessori Baby
• Bronson, NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children
• Doucleff, Hunt, Gather, Parent
• Huppert et al, Parental practices predict psychological well-being in midlife: life-course associations among women in the 1946 British birth cohort, Psychol Med. 2010 Sep; 40(9): 1507–1518. Published online 2009 Dec 9. doi: 10.1017/S0033291709991978, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3204412/.
• Lynch et al. Effects of early-life exposure to allergens and bacteria on recurrent wheeze and atopy in urban children. ASTHMA AND LOWER AIRWAY DISEASE| VOLUME 134, ISSUE 3, P593-601.E12, SEPTEMBER . Published:June 04, 2014. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaci.2014.04.018
• Siegel, The Whole Brain Child
• Rodsky, Fair Play