“ There’s a life in the future and it’s coming for us every day. So let’s get swept up in the beautiful chaos in front of us. Let’s make the future wait a little longer.”
– Jessica Urlichs, Beautiful Chaos
“I’ve figured out that my happiness-maximizing allocation is something like eight hours of work and three hours of kids a day. It isn’t that I like my job more than my kids overall—if I had to pick, the kids would win every time. But the “marginal value” of time with my kids declines fast. In part, this is because kids are exhausting. The first hour with them is amazing, the second less good, and by hour four I’m ready for a glass of wine or, even better, some time with my research.
My job doesn’t have this feature. Yes, the eighth hour is less fun than the seventh, but the highs are not as high and the lows are not as low. The physical and emotional challenges of work pale in comparison to the physical and emotional challenges of being an on-scene parent. The eighth hour at my job is better than the fifth hour with the kids on a typical day. And that is why I have a job. Because I like it. It should be okay to say this. Just like it should be okay to say that you stay home with your kids because that is what you want to do. ”
– Emily Oster, The Family Firm
My wife and I had a daughter about 18 months ago now. It has been one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences of our lives. Most people that ask me about the experience, I link them this essay which is comprehensively most of what I know and all of my thoughts on early baby life.
But what that essay doesn’t cover and is often the followup questions people have are: what went wrong and what were the mistakes you made that you can share for us to avoid. I’ve thought about that pretty deeply now and I think we made quite a few errors that I would try my best to avoid for our next baby.
Everyone’s mileage may vary but this is what really didn’t work for us and things I learned a lot from.
Milk and Feeding
My daughter was a very small baby at birth. So small that she was almost admitted to the critical care NICU of the hospital. We delivered with some of the best doctors in the country at one of the best hospitals in the country but money can’t solve problems of biology. Because she was right on the cups of small and healthy, rather than admit her to critical care, they let her stay with us if we put her on a 2 hourly formula bottle feed in addition to the breast feed.
So basically from birth my daughter was on formula and this turned out to be a very good thing. She was trying her best to grow and the extra feeds were helping her grow out of the danger weight rapidly. For a few months, this worked well but then the naturalistic family and social pressure started to build to drop the formula altogether and exclusively breast feed. “Breast is best” was something our families kept repeating to us and it is supposed to be best for the baby after all. But for us, this was a huge mistake. Here’s what happened.
We dropped the formula feeds and my wife started exclusively breast feeding. This created a scenario where for many months my daughter had to exist within a 1 hour travel radius of my wife at all times. My wife was basically unable to get any rest as a result and the burden of parental responsibility unevenly fell onto her because of this one decision to exclusively breast feed. Suddenly I was unable to feed my child and so what I could do with her became severely limited. This one decision to exclusively breast feed effectively cuts the knees from under the male when it comes to parental burden carrying and is how I felt. I wanted to do more but I physically couldn’t.
I think there’s a lot of social pressure from women projected onto other women to do things as “naturally” as possible when it comes to new babies. It starts with a stigma around C sections (which incidentally in first world countries is the safest delivery method) and develops into pressure to exclusively breast feed but I generally think it’s a mistake and doesn’t work for everyone. Especially families that are less traditional where the woman isn’t taking on the bulk of the parental role and the man is doing a lot more. Which is what we are doing.
After a few months of being exclusively breast fed with no formula at all. It was time to start migrating our daughter back onto formula and then cows milk. But here’s the catch, when my daughter spent so many months not being exposed to milk proteins, in that time she developed a dairy allergy. Because regular exposure prevented an allergy from developing, when we cut formula altogether, she went 6 months without getting any milk protein at all. The same way the best way to avoid a peanut allergy is to give a baby peanuts. Giving a baby milk protein desensitises them to dairy. Exposure is the best weapon against allergies.
Exclusive breast feeding had cascaded into a full blown dairy allergy where she would projectile vomit at even the slightest amount of dairy. Being allergic to dairy was a huge problem for us because it limited what food she could eat and extended the reliance on my wife for food. It took until our daughter was 12 months old before we were able to desensitise her to dairy and she was finally able to take a full milk bottle. This was when I was able to really take over completely and my wife could rest properly because I’d be able to feed her myself. I was finally not reliant on my wife to feed our daughter.
If I could have my time again, I would have fought against the “naturalistic breast is best mindset” and kept even a small amount of formula in her diet to continue her exposure to prevent the dairy allergy from developing in the first place. A very minor decision at the start cascaded into a year long problem for us that affected most aspects of our life.
Work and Money
I made a huge mistake when my daughter was first born in taking on a construction project that was meant to be completed 3 months before she was due. I thought I’d finish it before she was born but the project got delayed. When my daughter was 6 weeks old, I had to disappear for 2 full weeks close to 12 hours per day to finish the project. It wasn’t a lot of time in the scheme of things but it did something to our family unit in that we had built up a lot of momentum that we suddenly lost and struggled to regain for a long time.
That one project set us up financially for the next few years but it caused a lot of conflict in my marriage and my work. After 2 weeks of being away from my daughter, it was like she didn’t know me anymore. What used to be her being calm and sleeping gently on my shoulder was her screaming when she was handed to me. It took another few weeks before she acclimatised back to me. But that was more weight that went onto my wife than before those 2 weeks; weight which I was carrying.
If I was to do it again, I should have known better. Construction projects always have a bad habit of running over time. My biggest fear was that it would coincide with my daughter being born. While that didn’t happen, 6 weeks later was still pretty bad. I wouldn’t take on major projects within 6 months before or after a new kid being born. This was an avoidable unforced error that had a lot of upside financially but blew up our lives at the time.
Division of Labour
The way my wife and I divided labour was as close to equal as we tried to get. My wife does breast feeding, I do diapers. She does meals, I do sleep. She does mornings, I do nights. She does meal prep, I do baths. She does planning, I do logistics and inventory. I work from home while she has to work in a hospital, so I take my daughter during the days she’s working. My wife spent a lot more time with my daughter in the early baby months, I spend a lot more time with my daughter in the early toddler months. And so on. This works really well and is as close to equal as anyone can get.
In fact I think we’re a little atypical in that I’m the bulk of care for our daughter whilst also bringing in a material income. But here’s the part that doesn’t work and was the mistake. Right now we’re a well oiled machine. But when we started we weren’t playing to our strengths. We took all activities and split them down the middle and were each doing 50/50 of everything. But actually I’m a lot better at diaper changing than my wife is and she’s a lot better at meal prep than I am.
Plus in addition to playing to our strengths, we’d experience fatigue in different ways. I’m better at nights and my wife is better at mornings. To borrow a Dungeons and Dragons reference, I would experience 2 points of fatigue for every morning shift I would do but only 1 point of fatigue for night shifts. My wife was the opposite, 2 points of fatigue for night shifts and 1 point of fatigue for morning shifts. But in the beginning, I would be doing a lot of morning shifts and my wife was doing a lot of nights.
Actually to be more accurate my wife would sustain 5 points of fatigue at night while I would sustain only 2 points of fatigue doing overnights. Overnights are just harder. But it’s much of a muchness. The point is we spent a lot of time not playing to our strengths and not dividing labour properly. We had so many nights at the beginning before we’d allocated roles where we’d both wake up because we didn’t know whose role it was, leaving both of us badly rested.
It took a lot of experimentation until we realised what works better for us. It makes sense for me to do all the nights because I genuinely get less tired than my wife does when I do it. And similarly it makes sense for her to do all the mornings because she genuinely gets less tired than I do when she does them. Because when you’re tired it’s hard to experiment with how to make the whole system better. It took us a long time to learn how to and implement systems that played to each of our strengths and overall made our family unit stronger, better rested and less tired.
Now that we’ve nailed it, it also makes routines better and avoids a lot of conflict. For example when there’s a diaper, it’s just mine. When our daughter wakes up at night, it’s just mine. My wife doesn’t even need to think whose role it is and whether she needs to do anything. And we avoid all the time a discussion about who is doing it would have taken. That doesn’t need to happen anymore when something like that happens, we just both know. Conflict and time wasted both went way down. We should have implemented a system like this at the start.
Getting Help Quickly
We realised we needed help pretty quickly and that we were drowning. Being on our own in a city without any family around comes with a lot of unique challenges. The biggest one, if either my wife or I start to struggle, the whole unit struggles and there’s no one around to help pick up the weight. This hits particularly hard during periods of grief when someone dies or when you get very sick or work gets stressful, all of which happened to us in the first few months of my daughters life. Both my wife and I each had a breakdown at some stage in the first year of baby life and each time we needed help to get out of it.
My wife and I have very wide networks of professional colleagues and friends and big Indian families. It’s because we both lived in lots of different countries and had different careers and studied long degrees. As a result, our collective network of people is large but a byproduct of a large network is you experience a higher number of positive and negative life events. There are lots of birthdays but there are also a lot more deaths as you scale up the number of people. Within that context, here’s how that goes badly.
We have the particular misfortune of within my daughters first year of life, she has attended about 10 funerals of people that were close to us. That’s how much death was surrounding us during her first 12 months of life. But when you have a newborn that needs you, there’s no time to grieve or drop the ball at all. You’re not allowed to struggle when you have a baby and that’s a bitter pill to swallow.
In olden times, children were raised by a village. But I think the village has now diluted for most people into just the grandparents. But I think what was more surprising is that the grandparents themselves are getting older and are pulled in more directions and don’t have enough bandwidth or stamina. Especially in very large families. This was the case for us.
My wife’s parents were busy helping with my wife’s sisters 2 kids while her husband was in a different country for 6 months for work. My parents were busy caretaking my maternal grandmother who is in her 90s with dementia. The grandparents on both sides didn’t have anymore bandwidth with which to help us even if they’d wanted to.
It took us a bit of time to realise we needed to reach outside the family for assistance. For professional help. So we started looking for a nanny. We decided finding a nanny was the option that most aligned with our values. But from the time we realised we needed help and actually finding that help was a long time.
Finding a nanny that we loved took a long time. We eventually did and she’s been with us for over a year now and we hope she will be with us for many more years to come. But the search took us a few months and it then took another month for her to get used to our daughter and lifestyle. This was probably the hardest few months of our lives while we were carrying all the weight and exhausting ourselves.
What I would have done differently if I had my time again is I would have found the help before we needed it. The mistake I made is I relied too heavily on our families who were themselves preoccupied. I should have spent the time finding and filtering and engaging the professional help while we had the bandwidth before our daughter arrived.
I think every new parent has to do one of a few configurations. Either you engage a nanny, an au paire or you have the grandparents close to you. Those are the only configurations as far as I’m concerned that allow you to raise kids while also retaining your mental health. You have to pick one of them. I don’t think it’s possible to have a kid without using one of them.
This goes across the board for more roles than just baby related. I should have engaged cleaners more often earlier than I did. I should have gotten a dog walker for our 2 Spoodles earlier than I did. I should have hired a professional chef to cook our meals earlier than I did. I should have gotten a gardener earlier. I should have gotten a therapist to talk about how hard it all was earlier. I waited way too long to offload the work that was on our plates and it was a mistake that cost us a lot of our sanity and happiness.
There’s also a sort of promised land when you have scaled up the amount of professional help you have where if you break through the glass ceiling your life becomes quite extraordinary. I think this is a secret of rich people I’ve only just learned. In a sense what you’re doing by engaging so much professional help is buying the time back, the cost of which is how much all the services cost. If you can spend that time out earning how much it all costs, you practically go infinite and achieve a quality of life that I believed impossible while having both a career and children. You really can do it all but it just costs money.
Before we have our next child, I’m going to preemptively scale up the professional help in all aspects of our lives. The first 6 months are moments we’ll never get back with our daughter but we spent a lot of it burnt out and exhausted. That’s something we’re going to do differently for the next kid. It also didn’t help that our daughter was a bad sleeper…
Sleep Needs of Child Vary
Our daughter has never slept well at night. Ever since we brought her back from the hospital. A joke we say to each other is that we’re basically playing Russian Roulette with our daughter each night. Every night when she goes to sleep 1/3rd of the time she’ll sleep through the night. 2/3rds of the time she’ll wake up anywhere from 2 to 4 hours per night. Sometimes she’ll go months where she wakes up for 2 to 4 hours per night every night.
I do all the night wakeups so my wife sleeps through these. But it creates a sort of PTSD within your body of not knowing whether you’re going to get to have a good nights sleep or be up for 4 hours, every time I go to sleep. This problematic sleep has been running for pretty much her entire life. She’s a very good eater and speaker but her sleep is totally off the rails.
We did sleep schools and sleep consultants and paid all manor of fees for all sorts of “sleep specialists” but my daughter failed all of them. She was deemed a “non-compliant child” which is code for the sleep training doesn’t work on her. The problem with a lot of sleep training is it is a prescriptive mold that fits for most children. Rigorous bed times and cry it out and resiliance training for the parents not to give in. But it doesn’t work for everyone.
We tried it with our daughter but found she has more stamina than we did. Sometimes the “cry it out” would result in her crying for 3 hours straight and we were wrecks by the end of it. We learned pretty quickly that what we needed to do was just to cope as best as we could with it, which meant me coping as best overnight and then my wife taking her in the mornings so I could sleep and recover.
What does that mean? It means giving my daughter overnight whatever she needs to stay calm and not scream. Often that is a lot of cuddles and big bottles of milk. This is the part where parents reading will say, aha the milk bottles are causing her to wake up which reinforces the wakeup cycle because she gets milk when she does. We tried weeks with no overnight milk bottles, no dice. But what the overnight milk bottles do for Dad is they make the wakeups easier on me.
The other thing that made the wakups easier for me was investing in a really good pair of bluetooth hands free ear bud headphones. I have since finished somewhere between 100 and 200 books this last year because when you’re listening to a book for 2 to 4 hours most nights. Listening to books makes the time feel like it goes faster as well and the long nights actually feel like they go faster. Some nights I’m so deep into the book that I want my daughter to stay awake longer so I can keep reading, when it’s like 5am.
We could never figure out why she wasn’t sleeping until I finally stumbled on 2 versions of an answer from a paediatrician who wrote a book on sleep. They were 1) Prolonged sleep problems for a toddler may be a sign of advanced mental faculties or 2) Prolonged sleep problems for a toddler may be a sign of significantly reduced sleep needs. In short, my daughter wasn’t sleeping either because she was a genius or a vampire.
She has always been developmentally ahead, which is weird for a small baby, speaking as if she’s a 2 year old when she’s less than 1. Meaning her mind is racing all night to keep up with all that growth. Combine that with sickness, teething, sleep regressions, leaps and suddenly you have a recipe for near permanent sleep problems.
A mistake we made here is we were too prescriptive as a family and we listened to well intentioned advice that wasn’t tailored for us. My wife mandated a 7pm bed time because it’s what a sleep consultant told us. Plus she found it sustainable for some alone time each night without the baby that we could spend together. But it took me way too long to start to ignore the conventional wisdom and start to experiment with her sleep. This is when we tried 2 hacks that have started working for us. Later bedtimes and audiobooks.
The experiment that really worked and flipped her wakeups in the other direction (asleep 2/3rds of nights and awake for 1/3rd of nights) was just simple letting her go to sleep later and turning on an audiobook. We now have a baby whose bedtime is 9pm and she’s listening to financial real estate investing podcasts before bedtime each night.
That extra 1/3rd of sleep throughs is the difference between feeling like a zombie all the time and feeling like a real human. It’s hard to let her sleep less than 12 hours a night when everyone in your life is telling you that a baby needs more than 12 hours of sleep per night. It’s also hard when everyone is telling you what worked for them and it doesn’t work for you.
Identity Loss and Social Atrophy
When you become a new parent your old identity is gone. But your body is experiencing acute whiplash because you still feel like you, but you’re not. You’re this new parent version of you. I’m not Sohum anymore, I’m my daughters Dad. This is hard to process. You also go into this vortex of parent life where the world doesn’t make any sense except seen through the lens of being a parent.
A lot of the time you had for your past interests and the people you spent time with in those interests, just disappear. I’ll use an example that shocked me a while ago. I love Magic the Gathering, a collectible card game. I used to play it at the highest competitive level on the Pro Tour and Grand Prix’s. I loved playing Magic and I had a group of Magic friends who I’d play with every fortnight like clockwork. But then suddenly I was at my daughters first birthday party and realising this was the first time I’d seen those people since she was born. Let alone played Magic with them.
This is unintentional. You’re not avoiding people, you just physically don’t have enough time to do everything anymore. But the unintended consequence is a lot of your social connections start to atrophy. Especially if those friends are friendship gardeners and not friendship builders. The other part of this is that you just start to have less in common. Friends who are in different life stages feel like they’re living in different universes a lot of the time.
You start to naturally gravitate more towards friendships that are in the same life phase as you. But this was a mistake. I should have made more of an effort to reach out more and pinged those friendships more often. By not doing so, it only amplified my own loneliness. Thankfully most of these friendships are still there and intact. But what I didn’t appreciate is those people want to still reach out and participate in your life, if you keep the door open and let them.
Being someone who works from home whilst also being the primary caretaker of my daughter is a bit of a unique recipe for isolation and loneliness. Especially for an adult male. We’re a group that already has a well documented difficult time expanding social circles and making genuine adult friendships. I find a lot of male friendships are just secretly activity friends, they get together to watch football but don’t really know much about each other. I’ve never liked this style of friendship, if I know someone, I like to go deep.
Some days working from home and primary caretaking I will have more conversations with a toddler than another adult. But this has an easy fix. It’s as simple as asking your friends to come hang out with you and your child. It feels weird at first, you think why would they want to hang out with this baby, but it is actually really nice. It also allows your kid to develop relationships with these friends from your old life and it brings the relationships from your old identity into your new identity.
You Really Can Be Too Healthy
I grew up thinking that you can never be too healthy but actually when it comes to baby life sometimes you really can. There’s a word for it, Orthorexia. I had never heard of that word before. What it is is prioritising eating so healthily that it accidentally doesn’t get enough calories for growth. Nutritional density gets conflated with caloric density. For example it doesn’t matter how much spinach you eat there just isn’t enough calories in it for a baby to grow.
Which is what was happening at first. Our daughter was growing slowly. One day we were with our obstetrician and asked “if you have a pizza or a salad, which should you eat?” His answer, “the pizza and the salad.” That’s when it clicked and in the final trimester, my wife started replacing meals from pesto salads to pesto pastas and baby started growing faster and it resolved itself. This is probably the most benign of things we’d have done differently.
I think there’s something about today’s health conscious social media generation that leads to this. I’ve read about vegetarians and vegans not getting enough amino acids and ending up with chronic health issues which I think is the extreme version of orthorexia. Something about the pursuit of health accidentally cause health issues. But I guess everything in moderation, apparently even healthy food.
Dad Groups are Awful
Being someone who works from home whilst also being the primary caretaker of my daughter is a bit of a unique recipe for isolation and loneliness. Especially for an adult male. We’re a group that already has a well documented difficult time expanding social circles and making genuine adult friendships. I find a lot of male friendships are just secretly activity friends, they get together to watch football but don’t really know much about each other. I’ve never liked this style of friendship, if I know someone, I like to go deep.
The early parenting phase is generally quite lonely. It’s because you’re literally tied down by this new life. Governments in Australia are really good about trying to soften the blow of new parents life by allocating you into Mum’s and Dad’s groups where you form a group of about 12 other parents who both live close to you and have also recently had a new baby. This forms a little community to form friendships but also people who are going through the same experiences as you with which you can compare notes.
I’m not sure if this is a regret per se but I wish I had had a better Dad’s group. My wife’s Mum’s group by comparison absolutely love each other and are forging lifelong friendships together. The mum’s groups are just so much more supportive of one another. I don’t know if this is something about the difference between motherhood and fatherhood but I think it’s because the Mum’s are more often on the same wavelength. The Mums experience of new parent life is a lot more uniform than the Dad’s experience of new parenthood.
The Mum’s are usually the ones at home taking care of the children while the Dad’s are usually back at work. We as a society haven’t shifted very far away from this traditional family structuring and I think it’s the fault of workplace leave structures. Dad’s don’t go to work because they want to, it’s because they have to most of the time. They physically can’t get long term leave to care take and be at home. This I think creates a lot of resentment from the Dad’s who go to work towards the Dad’s who are at home or vice versa.
Within the Dad’s group whatsapp group. One dad who will be a stay at home dad will message asking if any of the other dads want to hang out, then some working dad will message passive aggressively that they can’t because they have a real job to bring money in for the family. This could be unique to the one Dad’s group I experienced but it was extremely toxic and basically caused the whole thing to disintegrate and none of us are friends or see each other at all. But I really feel it was a missed opportunity to create really deep and lifelong friendships, the way my wife’s Mum’s group has.
Daycare Hunger Games
Quality daycare options are really difficult to find and even more difficult to get into. There’s also a complicated system of offers that work around the calendar year and not the children’s ages. We thought around the time my daughter was 12 months old, we’d enrol her in daycare a couple of times a week so that my wife could go back to work.
We put her on the waiting list when she was 6 months old and got an offer in January, when she was only 9 months old. We thought it was too soon and said no to the offer, thinking when she was 12 months it would be straightforward to get her a spot. It was not straightforward. But by saying no to the offer in January means you don’t get another offer till the following January or until one of the children drop out of the daycare altogether. This was a huge shock to us.
So when we said no, it wasn’t for another 6 months, a total of 12 months on the waiting list, that my daughter finally got accepted into daycare and started a grand total of 1 day per week. Saying no to that January offer was a mistake, we should have accepted it and started her on 1 day per week then. Because we narrowly avoided missing out on a daycare spot altogether.
This is very similar to the private school system where for some of the best private schools there is a 12 year waiting list. I remember looking at some of the forms when my daughter was born and the admissions officer told me I was waiting too long to enrol her and that I’d risk missing a spot. When my daughter didn’t even have a name yet, let alone ID to be able to verify she even exists.
Conclusion
It’s not politically correct to say there are parts of the first years of your newborns life that you regret and would do differently. But for me there was a lot I would have done differently. What I hope to do for the next one is to learn the lessons and implement the systems before I get there. And to help all of my friends and anyone reading this avoid repeating the same mistakes I did.