Ask HN: Best Resources and Books for a Soon-to-Be-Dad?
Hello Hacker News community!
I've recently received the great news that I'm about to become a father. While this is an exciting time, it is also a little bit daunting. I'm turning to this community because I trust in the wisdom and diverse experiences you all can provide.
I'm looking for any recommendations on books, blogs, online resources, or other materials that could help prepare me for this new chapter of my life. I'm particularly interested in resources that touch on:
* Basic care for newborns (feeding, sleep patterns, etc.) * Understanding developmental stages and what to expect as my child grows. * Tips for supporting my partner during the pregnancy and postpartum periods. * Navigating work-life balance as a new parent in the tech industry. * Practical advice on creating a safe and stimulating environment for cognitive development. * Any resources that discuss modern and effective parenting styles. * Furthermore, if you've personally experienced lessons or tips that no book could teach, I would greatly appreciate if you could share them here as well.
I'm also aware that there is no single "correct" way to parent, and every child and situation is unique, but I'm hoping to equip myself with as much knowledge as I can to be the best dad possible.
Looking forward to hearing your suggestions, experiences, and insights!
Thank you. Joshua Sheats over at Radical Personal Finance just ran through an 18-part podcast series (starting at #908) on investing into one's children at a young age, spanning everything from conception through education and character development. Highly recommend listening through his thought process. It's mostly not financial, in this context, other than the idea that the early years may very well shape your and their financial future. He also has an extensive back-catalog on education, pregnancy, raising children, etc. A lot of the segments of the big series I referenced above have roots in topics he's covered over the years. Extremely well-spoken and thoughtful, but I'll attach the usual warning when posting any media to a broad audience like HN, you'll probably find values that you share and values that you don't, so approach with an open mind and extract what's valuable to your life. I know you've asked for pointers to materials and not direct advice, but since there is also direct advice being offered: Make a continuous effort to manage your expectations. Your idea of what it should be like to have a kid (especially past the baby stage itself which people tend to expect to be tiring and limiting) may not match the reality of the kid(s) that you have. My kid is not neurotypical, and it's taken me a long time (and I still have work to do) to get over the fact that my experience won't be like what other parents have, and that our family life isn't like what I remember when I was a kid. I'm happier now than I was when I was dwelling on that. I really hope that this is useless advice for you and that it's better than you expected! But taking nothing for granted, and going in expecting that things may be super tough will be good for everyone's mental health. Also: Being a good parent 80% of the time and a bad parent 20% of the time ('bad' meaning letting them watch too much TV, yelling or being short with them, etc. obviously not causing them real harm) is doing really great and you shouldn't beat yourself up for not being 100%. It's absurd to expect to be at your best 100% of the time. Nobody is! Congrats :-) I wish you all the best. You could take a look at Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care: 10th edition Pretty complete book of all the different phases without being to dogmatic. My personal advice:
Try to reduce stress (and work) wherever possible. It's good to be prepared, but don't try to plan or read too much, because you can't prepare for everything. There is always something, you did not have in mind. An example: The things you read about sudden infant death syndrome are frightning, really. The fear of doing something wrong will be with you from day 1. Try to keep it on a healthy level and do what you can. You will both be very tired in the first days, there are so many little things that WILL go wrong, but pretty likely nothing will ruin your childs life forever. It's ok, nobody is perfect. The things you should prepare is a pregnancy course (where you get much more information), organising a midwife after birth and get your documents ready... nobody want's to fight a paper war in the first days after your child is born. The weeks after birth will be extra hard, especially for your wife. Try to help her regenerate and keep an eye on her. Best case: Ask your / her parents / friends to support you in this time, e.g. with cooking, shopping and all the things that take much time or are exhausting, so you can focus on getting a rest and getting to know your baby. Oh, and get rid of the rumors, that breast feeding has to stop after 6 months. It's the best for your child, even with more than 18 months. Of course your wife should decide this.... Good luck! Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain After three it's too late Children's Garden of Verse Also I am following a lot of psy* experts which specialize on kids but they are not available in English. FWIW: Catherine Murashova, Dima Zicer, Vyacheslav Dubynin. I haven’t read Thirty Million Words but I second the idea of talking to your child. A lot. I try to tell mine what we are doing, what we are about to do, why we are doing things the way we are, etc. Also, because I don’t always succeed at explaining everything all the time, he asks a bunch of questions! So I try to answer each of his questions in a way he can comprehend as best I can. I’ve noticed that doing all of that, makes him happier, more confident, and less likely to have emotional outbursts. I do the same thing with my girlfriend's daughter. She's 2.5 and I try my hardest to talk with her, not to her. I want her to ask questions and try to think about why I am doing the things I am doing around my house. My girlfriend encourages it because that's how she's been raising her daughter. My only pitfall is using complex words and forgetting to go back and explain what the words mean. > I haven’t read Thirty Million Words but I second the idea of talking to your child. If to be honest, this is the only book from my list which I haven't read also. But I have read very thoroughly the "Eye Brain Vision" by David Hubel. He did not set his experiments to human and nowadays that kind of experiments seems like not possible any more even to animals. He might consider a child who has not received his 30M words as a "deprivation" if he worked in a human field (he worked only with cats, I mean young kittens). And he demonstrated a lot of examples about what deprivation does to a cat brain. I believe anything which is in Thirty Million Words without reading a page from it because I used to watch a lot of deprivation examples from kind of more advanced source. But of course Hubel's book is not about parenting at all. Congratulations. Here's the bit of advice I have that I think will help you most as new parents. Make sure you look after yourselves! It's really easy as a parent to spend so much time concentrating on what you children need that you forget to do what you need. Work with your partner to make sure that you both eat enough, drink enough and sleep enough. +1. Happy wife, happy life. Prior to looking into books, inspect the eyes of your spouse. Thank you for the valuable advice. I completely agree, taking care of ourselves is just as important as taking care of our child. No books but some experience.
(1) don't try to push things, kids develop at different rates. (2) eg we didn't potty train until she was just 3. We tried before that but it was stress with no upside. After three she had like maybe 5 'mistakes' over three weeks and that was pretty much it. You mileage may vary. (3) When your new born is about two weeks start staring in their eyes and stick out your tongue. It takes a few days but in a while they'll stick out their tongue in response. From there the sky's the limit for tongue communication. Way more fun that you think. I did this on my own but there's an early childhood educator who recommends it too and wrote a book (can't recall the name) (4) Discipline. Use the 'block system' it can eliminate almost all the time outs. For age 2y and 3y use five plastic blocks. Every time (use your judgement) they do something bad put a yellow plastic block in a visible but unreachable place. After they have five blocks up they get no more videos for the day. For age 4y and 5y do the same but use 3 blocks (at the younger age they eventually clue into 'oh, I have five blocks, I can burn three of them with no consequence'). (5) videos are not the tool of the devil. Kids naturally pay attention to the highest source of information that's available. In a boring house with slow changes (unlike, say, moving through the landscape all day long with a nomadic tribe) that information source is videos...but watch out for sunny bunnies no more than three day :) (6) Between the ages of 2 and 10 kids are good for absolutely nothing except learning languages, at which they are certifiable geniuses. Try not to waste this valuable window in time. We just started putting our kids on the potty around 5 months old.. they liked to sit on it and we would read to them. Sometimes stuff came out. But more importantly it was part of our routine before and after naps, and so by 1.5-2 they were fully trained mostly by themselves. Waiting too long can create issues with sitting on a seat with a hole in it - at least make that a common thing you do. Too many parents think the goal is to have a baby sleeping through the night, or alot, as soon as possible. NO! The goal in the early weeks is to have a well-fed baby so it can grow. Feed it every few hours! The baby has mostly heard mother's heartbeat. So when you hold it, be sure to place its head over your heart, or on your heart side. Finally, you are also the parent. A dad never babysits his own kid. Own this! Congrats! It’s difficult to navigate all the advice you’ll get. For early stages I sticked to one large book that has it all (the one I have is in French and is called j’élève mon enfant and covers everything), but I am sure you’ll find one in English - babies for dummies or something like that. You just need the basic guidelines for food, sleeping patterns, body care, clothing, etc. When problems arise, we got more specific help. Our second child wouldn’t sleep the first two months so my wife took some webinars to understand how to improve and the advice we got worked well. Regarding education, things get a lot more complicated. We are in a period when education ideas are changing and you’ll get all kinds of theories from: “never contradict a kid” to “kids these days need discipline more than anything else”. We found that Faber and Mazlish books are really good and grounded in real life situations. These helped us quite a lot. Being a dad is wonderful. Congratulations. My fatherhood (parent of four) has changed me in profound ways. The world glows brighter when we have a child with whom to share it. I’m delighted that you’re searching for information about being the best dad possible. My advice, which has been supported by personal experience and research, is that the relationship with the mother matters. Marry the mother and stay married. More than any other variable, more than any other technique or quality of being a dad, a stable marriage (stable, enduring relationship) is the best quality we can give to our child. It is strong predictor of a child’s success and happiness. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/cohabiting-parents-differ... The Baby Owner's Manual: Operating Instructions, Trouble-Shooting Tips, and Advice on First-Year Maintenance (Owner's and Instruction Manual) It's quick, to the point, and good value for new dads. At first you might be scared to trust your gut for lack of experience. Soon after, you may be afraid to embrace your newly developed intuition about baby’s needs out of respect for traditional parenting roles. Then there will be something else… there will always be something you find to worry about, most of which won’t matter at all. "Child is father to the man," as William Wordsworth put it. Congratulations to all three (+? :) of you! I'm in the EU, and in my country, this book by Anna Wahlgren gets sometimes suggested:
https://www.amazon.com/Love-Children-Childcare-Child-Rearing... Definitely an "opinionated" book (the author had nine children and was married seven(!) times), but also an honest one. 700+ pages, of which I remember only one quote: "Just being there is enough." That quote has helped me many times when parenting has caused mental doubt. Maria Montessori's books are also heartly recommended. I've heard Montessori before, and it seems like her approach aligns well with our interests. All the books sounds intriguing, I will take a look into them :) Thanks again for your recommendations. I loved reading Expecting Better and its sequel The Crib Sheet. The books are written by an economist who was annoyed when doctors could not explain why there was a certain guidance (e.g. no caffeine during pregnancy) so she researched all the studies behind various guidance. The book ends up being really informative, kind of going over all the stages of pregnancy, and also debunks some common guidance. It's also a weirdly comforting book, because oftentimes when you look at the data you realize you have a lot of wiggle room on things. This comment is not related to tactical parenting, you can survive without any advice on that (humans have been doing it for centuries). If I was going to suggest one thing to read as a soon-to-be-Dad, I'd recommend this reasonably short article by PG: http://www.paulgraham.com/vb.html It's cliche, and you probably won't really take it in until you realise it too late, but it GOES SO FAST! Start with How to Talk So LITTLE Kids Will Listen (Faber and King) in the How To Talk series. You can read the others as your child grows. Another resource I recommend is vlogs of families on YouTube. There is some controversy that this is not good for children. But some of them do share tough moments of parenting and that helps you realize that you are not alone when dealing with similar issues yourself. I won’t make a point of watching them though, just play in background while doing something else. From my experience the best gift to yourself right now is to do a lot of exercises, tick off a few smaller things you would like to achieve, and find help through parents and parents-in law. Also, find some remote gigs if not already, and figure out how to apply for parental leave and state financial assistance. Last but not least, ask friends with kids if they have things to donate or sell. The book “Commando Dad” For what seems like a jokey theme, it is a no nonsense bullet pointed guide for Mum and Dads. Like a cheat sheet. High recommend. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Commando-Dad-Elite-Carer-Birth-eboo... I highly recommend checking out "The Expectant Father" by Armin A. Brott and "Dude, You're Gonna Be a Dad!" by John Pfeiffer. These books provide practical advice and insights that will help you navigate the exciting journey of becoming a dad. Happy reading! Congratulations! Father of two here. As a new dad I found that I didn't know the first thing about babies, but newborns smell great, no kidding. Based on your desire to learn about the process, you'll be a great dad. Listen to your wife, she's better prepared than you are. Just try to enjoy the ride. > Listen to your wife, she's better prepared than you are. Haha, truer words have rarely been spoken. @OP: No book, podcast or anything else can teach you how to take care of your kid(s). By all means, read and listen to things but just dont tink of it as anything other than inspiration. Noone has the perfect solution, and perhaps not even the right solution for your kids. Trust your gut (and wife) as others have said. You will know what you kid needs better than anyone while constantly feeling you have no clue what you are doing. Honestly, have fun. Don’t get too caught up in the details and drama. The other thing is be involved and engaged. I got hooked coaching TBall and and now I have one more year till my son “graduates” from little league. That experience has been priceless and I recommend to anyone. You can't possibly take too many photos or videos... children look different every few days at first, and every week or so for a few years. Peek a boo is irrationally fun, enjoy it. I watch old video I made of it, and it still makes me irrationally happy. Congratulations! Some of my favorites are: * Brain Rules for Baby by John Medina * Brain-Body Parenting by Mona Delahooke Book recommendations: * Good Inside by Dr. Becky Kennedy * How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk (The How To Talk Series) by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish Good luck! Start with How To Talk So LITTLE Kids Will Listen (Faber and King) in the How To Talk series. Read the others as your child grows. i misread it as "soon-to-be-dead" and almost had a heart attack. Bad eyesight aside, not as a learning material for you, but purchase some fairytale books or illustrated stories. It's good to make you and your child closer over a bedtime story or admiring pictures until they can read by themselves. Happiest Baby on the Block What to expect when you are expecting Cowboy up and get on the right page.