This used to be advice from fathers in general, which is a polite way of saying nobody in particular. I have four children and I've done the first year four times. I'd rather put my name on it and be accountable for the parts that are wrong. Tommy is twelve. Erica is nine. Susan and Mary are two and arrived together. Four children across two quite different eras of received wisdom.
What's the best thing a father can do early?
Own something outright. Not help with it. Own it.
Sounds like semantics. It's the whole thing. Owning a job means you know how it works, you notice when it needs doing, and nobody has to ask. Helping means you're a willing pair of hands on somebody else's plan. It keeps you at arm's length for months while everyone tells you what a good father you are.
Bath time. The bedtime routine. The night wake that isn't a feed. Nappies at a fixed hour. One outing a week on your own with no handover briefing. Pick one and take it completely, from the first week, before the pattern of who-knows-what has set.
I spent Tommy's first six months as an enthusiastic assistant. I didn't understand what I'd missed until the twins arrived and there was no possibility of waiting to be asked. Being the only available adult is a good teacher. Don't wait for twins to arrange it for you.
How do you handle the night shift without losing the week?
Split it by block, not by turn. Decide in advance, while you're both calm.
Alternating wakings sounds fair. It means neither of you gets an unbroken stretch, and an unbroken stretch is what restores a person. Far better: one takes until two, the other takes two until morning. Each gets four or five hours in one piece. Whoever is off duty sleeps somewhere else with the door shut and doesn't surface out of guilt.
If feeding is by breast, the non-feeding parent still has plenty to do. The change. The winding. The resettling. Bringing the water. Do those and the feeding parent is awake for eight minutes instead of thirty.
Count the working week properly. Driving to a site at six in the morning is a real constraint. So is being alone with a newborn all day. Neither is the harder job. Pretending otherwise is how the argument starts.
More for the other parent
What did fathers say they wish they had ignored
Speaking only for myself now. I've stopped pretending to survey anybody.
- Every schedule and routine promising a baby who sleeps through by twelve weeks. Two of mine did roughly what the book said and two treated it as fiction. And the difference was temperament and not technique.
- Advice to leave a very young baby to cry it out. Whatever your view on sleep training later, it doesn't apply to newborns, and it made me feel dreadful for no benefit.
- The idea that you shouldn't hold a baby too much. You can't. This one was still circulating when Tommy was born and it's simply not true.
- Anything beginning "in my day". Some of it was sound and a good deal of it has been specifically advised against since, and sorting one from the other in a conversation at Christmas isn't a productive use of anybody's evening.
- The comparison with other people's babies, which is a reliable route to feeling bad about a child who's entirely fine.
What about the part nobody warns you about
A lot of fathers feel very little at first and decide something is wrong with them.
Most men who describe a delayed sense of connection put its arrival at three to six months, when the baby starts visibly responding. Common enough to be unremarkable. Almost nobody says it out loud, so every man who feels it assumes he's the only one.
There's a more serious version and it deserves naming. Around one in ten fathers gets depressed in the year after a birth. A meta-analysis of forty-three studies put it at roughly 10 per cent, highest at three to six months. It's badly under-recognised. Nobody asks fathers, and it doesn't look like sadness. It looks like irritability, withdrawal, and a sudden enthusiasm for staying late at work.
Numb, persistently angry, disconnected after several months, finding reasons not to come home? Take it to a doctor. It's common, it's treatable, and it responds a lot better early. I know this isn't the sort of thing one brings up. Bring it up anyway.
How to stay helpful when the baby only wants the other parent
By continuing to turn up. Duller than you wanted. Also correct.
A strong preference for one parent is ordinary. It peaks around eight months to a year, with separation anxiety. It isn't a verdict on you and it isn't permanent. Withdrawing makes it permanent, because withdrawal cuts the contact, and contact is the only thing that shifts it.
Keep your owned job even when she protests. Do the parts of the day that aren't about distress. The bath, the walk, the floor time, the sheer nonsense. Then you aren't only the one she gets when she wants somebody else. Take the handover gracefully when she's upset. It isn't a scoreline.
What's the advice that held up best
Three things. I'd keep all three if I lost everything else.
First, presence beats technique. Involved fathering in the first year shows up in children's outcomes years later. The mechanism is unglamorous: being there, responding, repeating. Unremarkable weekday evenings do the work.
Second, a slightly different way isn't a worse way. Corrected constantly, you'll stop doing the thing, which suits nobody. Say so out loud while you're both calm. A nappy fastened slightly wrong isn't a problem. A father who has stopped doing nappies is.
Third, it's much longer than it feels. Tommy is twelve and communicates largely in sarcasm, which I'm told is my fault. He still comes and sits next to me when there's football on. I'd like to say that was a strategy. It was about four hundred baths.
This guide is general information, written to help you understand a topic and ask better questions. It is not medical advice and does not replace your own doctor, midwife or paediatrician. Anything that worries you about your baby belongs with them.