Resource Recommendations for New Parents by a Data-Driven Mother
There is a lot of advice about parenting on the Internet, and I recognize that this list of recommendations may just add to the noise. Nevertheless, I have long enjoyed wading into of the tidal wave All The Information. Hence, this is a list of recommendations for a particular kind of person that likes their parenting decisions made with an extra dose of nerdy.
Pre-Baby:
Mother Nature by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
Mother Nature is an anthropological tome of motherhood from bees to birds to primates. Aside from the first couple chapters that discuss how the cultural view of motherhood came to be as part of a deeply patriarchal system of thinking, humans do not even make an appearance until around Chapter 9. This was a book that really helped me situate my perspective of motherhood from a species-perspective, and comforted me because it was only indirectly about my particular situation. The primary takeaway of this book for me is that mothers do not have to be wired “to be good, perfect, loving” and that anyone who tries to tell you differently is probably just propping up patriarchal systems of thinking that benefit themselves. The real message of motherhood is that throughout all the species, mothers are making very difficult choices about how to mother, and that they must do so in a calculated, logical cost-benefit analysis where they are thinking about not only how to preserve themselves, but also their other young. We as humans are not alone in this, but we are one of the only species inundated with harsh messages and social judgment about how we make choices.
This was a really comforting read that I kept coming back to even after my baby was born, and finished around 5 months postpartum.
Yoga with Stephanie Synder from Glo
I went to a few yoga classes while pregnant, but found myself more than a little frustrated by how so many of the poses were off limits to me and my growing baby. As my belly grew, I found myself wishing for classes that were designed for pregnancy, and to my delight, found a whole host of classes on Glo, which is a subscription yoga service that you can do from your home. I was personally turned off by the tone of some of the yoga instructors, which felt more like, “You’re a momma cat! Roar for your baby!” but found that Stephanie Synder’s classes always resonated. She was reassuring me to make space for my baby, both physically and mentally, and her classes left me feeling empowered. Before pregnancy, I never was able to do a long yoga class from my own home because I would get bored and my attention would drift, but during my pregnancy, I found that the poses felt so good for my body that I relished longer classes. During my third trimester, the classes for lower back pain were particularly amazing. I also continued with postnatal classes after my baby was born, and these also really helped with the unique pains that come alongside the ways we hold and carry newborns and then growing babes.
Maternity Care Midwives birth classes on YouTube
My spouse and I meant to actually go to a birth class together before our baby came, but with my spouse working to grow a design studio and with me trying to finish up my PhD coursework, it didn’t end up happening. After researching the variety of classes we could have taken, I found the Maternity Care Midwives birth classes with midwife Holliday Tyson. We were able to watch these free videos together on a Sunday afternoon when I was around 36 weeks. While I knew most of the information from the videos, it was helpful to watch together and discuss my needs before we experienced the birth itself. I found the segments about after birth helpful, and Midwife Tyson’s reassurances about all the things that might happen were very soothing. A lot of it was, “This may happen, that’s normal. This may happen, that’s normal” and I can still hear her saying, “that’s normal” and it makes me appreciate the range of parenting experiences we can have, and that’s normal.
After Baby
Precious Little Sleep by Alexis Dubief
TBH, I did not start with this. After we came home from the hospital, I began co-sleeping with the baby, and I know everyone is saying, “Don’t co-sleep,” and I didn’t think I was going to, but then it just seemed to happen on its own. Acknowledging that humans have co-slept for much of our special existence, I read up on this practice since it seemed a) inevitable and b) possibly the only way I would ever sleep since human-child cried when put down “almost asleep, but not asleep” (sounded like some dark magic, but okay, I am sure it works for some of you). I read Sleeping with Baby by James McKenna, and it has some pretty basic information about safe co-sleeping, e.g. hard surfaces, no blankets, one pillow per adult, bed on floor. This is how I managed the first 3 months. After 2.5 months, I could no longer do the twilight sleeping, and I was convinced that the babe and I were waking each other up, and I moved on to teaching my child how to sleep using the Precious Little Sleep book, which was great, and hilarious, and helped me figure out a plan to help my baby sleep.
The basics are pretty simple: it’s basically creating sleep associations for your baby that they can accomplish independently. Nursing, for example, is a sleep association that they cannot do for themselves, so if they need to nurse to sleep, then they will always need you. I needed to not be needed because I was slowly losing my vitality after months of only twilight sleep, and so we started the “weaning” process, and by this I refer to gradually getting my child to be less addicted to his sleep associations that required me, and then I understood the concept of “put baby to sleep sleepy but not asleep” which in fact is dark magic, but a magic that works (at least, it did for mine at 3.5 months). Precious Little Sleep is sacrosanct in my home, and everyone has to honor the Goddess of Consistency with offerings daily, and gradually, my joie de vivre is returning.
The Nanit baby monitor
I would be remiss not to mention the importance of the Nanit for all of my sleep training needs. I don’t know if other baby monitors do what the Nanit does, but for a data-driven parent, it was extremely soothing and also very helpful. The Nanit is a camera that is anchored above the crib, and it keeps track of when the baby wakes, sleeps, and is visited by a person. It also captures sound and video, but honestly, those features I am sure can be done better by other monitors. The value of the Nanit is in its data tracking and analysis, which helped me to identify patterns (really, using bar charts) so that I could reduce the number and quantity of feedings gradually until my child could go all night without eating. I guess, theoretically, one could keep track of these things manually. I know there are apps for that. But when I am in the twilight zone of existence, I was not thinking, “what is the exact time? how long has he been nursing?” I was more like, “hummmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmm mmmmmmmm” which is to say, I had zombified and could not function like a thinking person.
The Nanit also analyzes your baby’s sleep and compares it to other babies’ sleep and tells you, objectively, what kind of night it was. Each morning, it would give me the lowdown: “Your baby had a bad night” and I was like, yeah, obviously, but then, as we progressed, it would say, “Your baby had a fine night” and I was like, huh, really? and it was, weirdly, encouraging. I was like, you know what, yes, he did have a fine night, because I had these statistics telling me so. And then, when he had GOOD nights, it felt like victory, and at first, they were all unicorns, but after a while, they were just all good nights, and that’s how it happened, and the Nanit really helped.
Fearless Feeding by Jill Castle and Maryann Jacobsen
This is a reference book about nutrition for babies to teenagers, and helpfully includes a philosophy about feeding your child that is unrelated to all the minute decisions people tend to obsess over (e.g. organic, purees, baby-led weaning, etc.), particularly when the babes are so young. It advocates for assertive parenting styles around food, where you decide what, where, and when your child eats, and they get to decide whether and how much they eat. It highlights some approaches to eating that can be harmful later on, so you can try to approach the whole affair with confidence and consistent rules. It also gets pretty detailed about exactly which nutrients kids need and when, which is pretty overwhelming, but which ultimately I appreciated. There’s a lot of mythology on the Internet about the magical qualities of breastmilk, and the rhyme “food before one is just for fun,” and this book was a helpful reference for me to feel confident in how I approached food with my child.
Go Diaper Free by Andrea Olson
I am by no means an “elimination communication” evangelist, but this is how it happened: in the early days of my child’s outer worldly existence, I would change his diaper and then he’d immediately poo. This happened often. So often that I begun to call it “baby science” (another strange baby science I noticed in those early days was that if I had just put on a clean shirt, he would immediately spit up on me — the newer the shirt, the faster the spit up). And then, after this pattern continued, I had a fleeting thought: had I once heard of this? of infant toileting? and so I did some Googling and found yes, this is a Thing and it is “elimination communication” or “EC” or, my preferred term, “assisted pottying.” It is not “potty training” because my kid does not and did have have those skills. It’s just based on the idea that all animals are born not wanting to sit in their filth, and mine in particular was actually pretty adamant about that to the point that he’d only poo in a clean diaper, and while I was standing there at the changing table, so that he’d get immediately changed.
The natural rhythms of my child, plus the fact that I was full-time with him through his first four months, made assisted pottying make sense for me, and I found Andrea Olson’s book a practical guide for learning about how to get started.
Positive Discipline for 0–3 by Jane Nelsen
This book I just recently read because I realized that I had a lot of feelings about discipline and what I did not want to do, but I was struggling to clearly articulate my perspective on what I did want to do. I currently teach a class on Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, which outlines the research-based strategies for supporting students in school, particularly those with special needs. Numerous studies have shown that the former punitive ways of disciplining students does not work, and for those with behavioral challenges, can lead to significant inequalities for their educational experiences, hence the need for PBIS. The long and short of this philosophy is: prevention, education, response. When students are doing inappropriate or undesirable behaviors, you begin by understanding that their behavior is happening because it serves a function, i.e. your baby is chewing on USB computer wires because their gums are aching and the wire soothes their pain. Understanding the function allows you to see the behavior as servicing a need. Rather than telling your baby “no!”, you begin by preventing the behavior in the first place (change the setting). You can prevent the trigger by rubbing teething oil on their gums. You can provide a teething necklace or toy as an alternative behavior that serves the same function. When your child does the desirable behavior, you respond with praise. While this becomes differently complicated as children age, the essence of the strategy remains the same.
Since I already read a book on sleeping, toilet training, and eating, I skimmed through much of this book. I hesitate to totally recommend it because I am not sure if it resonated because I already had a strong understanding of positive discipline, but I do think it had some great reflection questions and helped me orient my perspective about this philosophy for a very small child. I think that a lot of parents struggle with this book because it does not fit into what they would typically understand as discipline. The emphasis on changing conditions, creating connections, and redirecting behavior feels very hokey given our current culture of blame and shame, but ultimately, the book is about honoring your child’s burgeoning autonomy and teaching them desirable behavior rather than just saying “no” or punishing, which can lead to disconnection and does not always help your child understand what to do, particularly when they are very small.
Cribsheet by Emily Oster
Emily Oster is an economist and her day-job requires her to analyze data and tease out causality in the relationships that she studies, and so she reviewed lots of literature on mothering and wrote a whole book about what she found out about causality in parenting research. The thesis of the book is essentially this: there are a lot of limits to what we can learn from the research about parenting choices, so you have to weigh out what is the best decision based on the unique needs of you, your family, and your child. As simple as this is, it’s really a bit revolutionary to the modern guilt associated with parenting choices. People are vitriolic about other parents’ decision to sleep train babies, or formula feed, or do purees, or baby-led weaning, and it helps to know that — for the most part — the choices you make are the ones that make sense based on a unique set of needs that only apply to your family. In Cribsheet, she does a good job explaining the research that exists and then providing some direction, but most of it comes down to preference (for the TLDR; version, you can read articles she’s written in The Atlantic and The New York Times, or check out the article written about her in The New Yorker)
There’s still lots more research ahead in my future — pediatricians and dentists and day cares and schools and what’s that rash? but this was my starting point, and these resources helped me in big and small ways. I wish you peace in your learning, whatever part of the journey you’re on and whatever decisions you’re making at the moment.
