Dr. Cowan | Your first days home with baby and why you don't have to get everything right

Dr. Cowan’s Tips for Parents:

1. Your baby is unconditionally forgiving
2. Parenting is a two way dance with your baby
3. Trust your intuition

Transcript

So let's talk about that first day you get your new baby home, which is like thrilling mind-bending experience for anybody because it's brand new and parents feel very responsible as they should, and their heart has expanded as big as a house.

But it's kind of overwhelming because we don't know how to trust ourselves necessarily. We get a little in our head and we think a little too much. And so what I try to explain to the parents to encourage them that they can do this, that it's really natural and that people have been having babies for millions of years before there were doctors, books, and specialists and videos and internet.

What I'm always trying to encourage in parents is a level of self-forgiveness for not having to get it all right. That the baby is ultimately forgiving, unconditionally forgiving, and is recognizing you're trying to figure it out and she or he is trying to figure it out too.

What I really like to encourage new parents is to take this as like a training. The baby's training you, you're the student, the baby's the teacher, baby's also a student and you're the teacher. But it's a two way kind of dance of learning, open learning and like let's figure it out. Trust your intuition to know the right thing to do. Because generally as Occam’s razor would say, the obvious things are the obvious answer, right? The common sense things.

Don't overthink it. Trust yourself. You've got this.