My Top Three Pieces of Advice for New Dads.
Either through the pregnancy, or through the early newborn days, I’m sure by now that you’ve been inundated with advice from your family members, or even from strangers. Some of my favourites include:
“You will NEVER sleep again.”
“You will look back at these days and think about how easy things were then.”
Or generally advice from parents who thought their children were absolutely perfect and listened to every damn word they ever said.
Here’s my top three pieces of advice for new dads
Everyone is an expert on THEIR OWN CHILDREN. What worked for them may work for you, but not necessarily. A perfect example: just about everything that worked for our daughter, did NOT work for our son. Don’t lose hope if their advice didn’t work for you.
It’s going to get better. It’s always easier for someone on the other side to say that, but what always made me feel better was hearing other dads tell me something like: “Look, you’re in the shit now, but it will get better.” There will be times that you might feel like you won’t make it through, but you will. I’m sure your wife/partner felt the same at some point during pregnancy, or labour, and yet amazingly women often consider having a second child!
It’s worth the hard work. The best accomplishments in life come from hard work. In full honesty, my experience in the early weeks; the larvae stage, or the fourth trimester, was pretty brutal. Particularly with our second born. There will come a point in time where that little larvae smiles at you, or your two toddlers come running into your arms screaming “Daddydaddydaddy!”, and you realize those hard moments were worth it.
You can do it!
-Physiodad