Almost everything written about the first year is about what the baby is learning, and very little looks the other way. That has always struck me as odd, because most parents will tell you that year changed them more than any other, and I'd say the same about all five of mine.
I've had five of those years myself and watched ten more from a little distance, which is the better seat. Here's some of what a baby teaches, usually without meaning to. I forget who taught me which lesson. They blur.
That attention is a physical thing
A baby can tell the difference between being looked at and being looked at by someone who's thinking about something else. She reacts to it straight away, long before she has words, and she'll do it to a grandmother with a phone in her hand as readily as to anyone.
It's a slightly uncomfortable discovery. Most adult attention is partial, and we'd all rather assumed nobody could tell.
That most urgency is optional
A baby has no interest whatsoever in your schedule. Feeds take the time they take.
In the first months, much of what had felt urgent was optional, and much of what had felt optional (eating, sleeping, sitting down) was the foundation. It's a harsh audit and a helpful one, and it's the only time in my life anybody has done one for me without being asked.
In the same spirit
That needing help isn't a failure
Humans are born more helpless than almost any other animal, and the species has done perfectly well regardless, because being cared for is the strategy and not a deviation from it.
Watching a baby be completely unembarrassed about needing everything shows how strange the adult reluctance to ask for anything really is. I've needed a lot of help in my life, across several countries and one very long marriage, and I was slow to learn this one.
That repetition isn't boredom
The same book, the same song, the same spoon dropped from the same high chair forty times in a row. To an adult it reads as a failure of imagination. To the baby it's an experiment being replicated. Does it happen again? Does it happen if I do it slightly differently? Does it happen if somebody else is watching? Almost everything any of us is good at was built that way, cooking included.
That feelings don't need managing to pass
A baby is furious, completely and without reservation, and then within minutes isn't. No reflection, no attempt to be reasonable, no residue at all.
Adults tend to either bottle a feeling up or pick it apart at length. A baby shows a third option, which is to feel it fully and then be finished with it. I've known very few adults who could do that, and I married one.
That the ordinary isn't ordinary
The washing machine is fascinating. So is a leaf, a set of keys, the shadow a lamp throws across a wall.
Children don't rank interesting things yet, and spending enough time around that gives some of it back to you for a while. It's the closest thing to a holiday you'll get in a very tiring year, and cheaper.
That you can start again after getting it wrong
Every parent snaps at some point, on no sleep, over nothing whatsoever. I have, more than once, and with more than one child, and at least once in front of my mother, who said nothing, which was worse.
What a baby shows you is that repair is available straight away and that she'll accept it. Developmental research describes this well: things between parent and baby go wrong and are put right all the time, and the putting right is where security is built. What counts isn't never getting it wrong. It's how reliably you put it right.
That being unfinished is fine
A baby isn't a smaller version of a person waiting to be completed. She's entirely herself at every stage while also changing constantly, and there's no contradiction in that, though it took me three children to stop looking for one.
It's a thing to borrow. The version of you that exists at three in the morning in the eighth week isn't a failed draft of the parent you meant to be. It's the parent, on that night, which is the only kind there has ever been.
And one that is less comfortable
A baby will also show you exactly which of your own habits you didn't choose. The tone that arrives in your voice unbidden. The reaction to mess. The impatience at one specific hour of the evening, which in my case is a quarter to six.
Very little exposes an inherited habit faster than a small person copying it back at you. Most parents find at least one thing they mean to stop passing on, and noticing it is most of the work. I found mine somewhere around the third child, later than I'd have liked and earlier than my mother managed.
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.