The arrival of a baby for first-time parents represents a radical change in their lives, for which they are often not prepared. This is normal, given that your daily life changes after birth, and adapting to the new situation involves facing many challenges with which we have no previous experience.
Since no one is born taught, it is important for parents who have just had their first child to learn all those issues that will be important for their lives from now on. So let’s see a compilation of mini-tips for new parents in which we will emphasize mental health and emotional management.
These are the main tips that we must take into account as new parents when ensuring both the well-being and correct development of the child and our own quality of life.
1. Don’t neglect your health
The first advice that we must follow as new parents is not to neglect our own health, since parents with problems of this type will have more problems when raising their children. After all, Physical and mental health is linked to our ability to pay attention to needs in the moment and react to them fluidly
To maintain healthy daily habits, we must continue to maintain, as far as possible, all those activities and habits that we carried out before the birth of our son or daughter.
These habits include a healthy diet, correct personal hygiene habits and also doing sports on a daily or weekly level. In addition to that, it is also important to maintain leisure habits that help us remain motivated and happy during the week.
In that sense, it is important to maintain a social life that is not much less rich than the one we had before the birth of the child This means that we should not eliminate meetings with friends at the root; Not only is it a measure that helps prevent mental health problems (the possibility of talking to others about our feelings is very important), but we can also learn valuable information about first-time parenthood and get to know other points of view on the problems we face. We face the challenge of parenting.
Staying with loved friends and family will allow us to have a good quality of life, have external support that can help us with our child, and have good mental health.
3. Distribute daily responsibilities
Ensuring a fair and equitable distribution of domestic responsibilities and those related to baby care is also essential so that both parents work equally and no asymmetries arise.
It is important that there is correct communication between parents, since not talking about these issues can cause one person to end up carrying too much work and conflicts arise between the couple.
The teamwork of the parents will help ensure that family life is satisfactory for both parties and that the baby is always well cared for and attended to, not suffering so many ups and downs due to the accumulation of work and stress.
4. Don’t get obsessed with the baby’s psychological development
It is also important that you do not become obsessed with controlling everything that surrounds the child’s daily life. For example, constantly being aware of the music that is heard at home, the colors that predominate in the home, etc.
Although new parents have a tendency to become obsessed with protecting their children and optimizing their exposure to situations tailored to their developmental needs, it is important to remain calm and relying on both one’s own parenting skills and babies’ resilience when experiencing unpleasant situations Their psychological development is not as fragile as many people believe.
5. Be informed carefully: quality is better than quantity
Being informed as much as possible is also important to acquire knowledge about all those topics that concern us or about which we have doubts as new parents. Now, if you spend most of your free time trying to educate yourself as a parent, not only will you not be better equipping yourself to do well at parenting, but You will be missing the opportunity to “filter” that advice, separating the well-founded ones from the rest, and to learn from the interaction with your baby
We can inform ourselves with any of the thousands of books specialized in motherhood and child care, the important thing is not to become obsessed or over-informed; The latter will lead us to give great importance to erroneous beliefs that have spread through sensationalism.
6. Share doubts
In the same way that we inform ourselves, it is also important to share our doubts with those who can help us, whether they are friends, professionals or close family members. Not only does it benefit us, but, in many cases, it can even serve to strengthen ties and so that other people feel better for helping us by contributing their experience.
However, we must also learn to set a limit with those people who want to help us, since sometimes they can make the mistake of being too burdensome or invasive.
7. Organize your time
Organizing one’s own time is essential to be able to carry out all the new tasks and activities that we must take responsibility for as new parents.
In the first weeks it is common for us to find it difficult to organize our time well and take advantage of it to combine our daily life with taking care of children. Organization is something that is learned over time and that we must continue to perfect. maintaining well-defined schedules that are visible (for example, under a magnet on the refrigerator).
8. Organize expenses
Just as it is common not to have a good organization of time, with the first child it can also happen that we spend more than expected, since many times we do not know which products are essential and which are not.
Therefore, with the aim of optimizing our finances and getting the most out of them without spending too much, it is advisable make a list with all the essential products that we should buy and; That way you will have a global vision of the priority of each purchase.
9. Manage visits
Another issue that we must keep in mind is that of visits, since during the first weeks many well-known people will want to meet with us to meet the creature.
To avoid getting overwhelmed with visits from friends and family It is advisable to go to their homes instead of them coming to visit us since in this way we can have control at all times and leave when we want, without suffering tension between the needs of our child and social pressure.
10. Have care materials ready
If your son or daughter is very young, it is worth keeping care materials well organized, such as diapers, talcum powder, etc. This will prevent you from constantly exposing yourself to stressful situations in which you have to go to another room, leaving the child in a not very safe part of the house without your supervision.
