The Best and Worst Advice For New Parents

Guess what comes in abundance as soon as you announce your pregnancy?

Congratulations? No, it is just a small part. Questions regarding the pregnancy? Not as much as expected. Advice? Now that comes in hordes. This advice actually starts just after marriage, as if you can get pregnant a couple of days after getting married. Once you are visibly pregnant though, and just after you give birth, you get advice from everyone, and ironically you get advice on how to be a perfect parent and how to raise perfect children from those who are not married or from those who don’t have children. Here’s a compilation of advice that I’ve received over the years since marriage: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The good:

1. Remain calm and composed, your child will feed off your energy. If you are calm and composed the child will also be calm and composed and if you stress out then your child will become cranky. This is the best advice that I have received and if someone asks me, this is what I say as well. See how I said ‘asks me’, instead of offering unasked, unsolicited advice.
2. Plan but be flexible. With any stage in a child’s life it is always better to plan everything beforehand and get into a routine, but this should not make you rigid. You should be flexible and open to changes as different situations can crop up, especially with kids.

The bad:

1. Sleep when your child sleeps. For the life of me, I can’t imagine who came up with that advice, and especially if you are mum, living away from the family and has no help. If you sleep when the child sleeps, then who is going to look after you, the house, and other kids if you have any or get the meals ready? So for me, what has worked best so far is taking a nap or a break when my husband comes home, so that I can hand over the baby to him, that way all the work is usually when the baby naps and also I get uninterrupted rest time because I know that someone reliable is there with the baby.
2. Let children cry, they will soothe themselves – apparently if you carry or cuddle a child whenever they cry it shows that you are readily available. Imagine yourself in that child’s shoes. They cry because they don’t know how to talk and verbalize their needs. If you were ignored and your needs weren’t met, would that soothe you or harm you? Same with babies, the more you let them cry it out in the hopes of them self-soothing, the more they will get irritable and distant from you as they grow up.

The ugly:

1. This is my favorite ugly advice – when couples are having a rough patch in their marriage, the most common advice is to have a child. Having a child does not magically solve all your problems or strengthen your marriage. Having a child will test your marriage to the extreme; it will push you to your boundaries, it will test your patience. If the foundation of a marriage is strong then a child will strengthen a marriage, but if the foundation of a marriage is weak then the child will make it weaker.
2. Show the child who’s boss – I agree that children need to respect you as parents, but they do not need to fear you because you are their parent. Fear only creates children who are better liars and children who become distant from you and become an expert at hiding their true self from you. Your child should know that you are a team and that they can come to you anytime they need, and that you will always be there for them. This is not being ‘best-friends’ with the child and giving into whatever your child demands because you want to be more like  a ‘friend’ towards them than a parent. It is about them being able to find a good and reliable parent, a safe space and solace for them. They should look up to you as an exemplary role model and like to emulate you, but at the same time, they should be able to confront you when you make a mistake.

Other important and relevant advices I have been given and I try implementing everyday:

1. Don’t parent your child the way you were parented
2. Your child is not you, don’t try to vicariously live through your child.
3. If you were brought up in a toxic household, break the cycle
4. Model the behaviors that you will want your child to follow
5. Teach them big things in small, age appropriate ways
6. Use kind words, for your tone and words become their inner voice
7. Love and respect yourself, your partner and your marriage so that they will learn from you how to love and respect themselves and how a relationship should be
8. Take time to do what you love and enjoy what you do, so that they learn and appreciate the power of and fall in love with spending time with themselves
9. Teach them to be confident and speak the truth so that another person’s confidence doesn’t make them insecure
10. Teach them as Muslims how important is our relationship with Allah, ourselves and everyone around us.
11. Always listen to your child, no matter how small, or how often it is repeated, because if you don’t listen to the small stuff when they are small, they will not share the big stuff when they are big.

Written by Khadijah Hisham