I am a new parent and I regret how I interacted with every other new parent before I joined their ranks. It’s not that I said offensive or hurtful things; I just said inane or useless things. Something profound just happened in this person’s life and I could have had a real conversation with them if I had only known what to ask.
I am writing down a short list of what I wish I had known about chatting with new parents. Use it at your own discretion.
This list also tries to help you tiptoe around some real danger zones. Being a parent to an infant is hard. Newborns can have health issues. Delivery can be difficult. Marriages can be strained. And you have no way of knowing which of those impact your friend or acquaintance.
That’s a tough balance because some of the best conversations rely on vulnerability, but if you are that close to a person then you’ll figure out how to navigate those topics. This is for your acquaintances.
Guaranteed to make the new parent happy. They absolutely have photos of the child they are convinced is the most adorable in the world and they want to show them off. After our son was born I was so excited about it that I would show photos to neighbors in our elevator without them asking.
Parents just named a new human being on this earth. In all likelihood that child will carry their first and middle names with them for the rest of their lives. This was a real decision.
And in many cases it was high-pressure and nerve wracking until it became really fun. You settle on a name, you give it to the child, and then you fall in love with the child. That journey becomes a fun story.
At worst, the answer will be somewhat trivial like “we just liked the name John Doe.” And that really is the extent of how bad it can be. You might get some cases where the parent divulges that they have buyer’s remorse about the name, but that is both a much more interesting story and an opportunity to encourage them.
For obvious reasons, most people avoid naming their child something that recalls bad memories. You aren’t going to be told “yeah, we named them John Doe after this football coach that I hated who was also a degenerate gambler.”
You’ll most likely just give us a chance to tell you a story about a person we like or a name we found. We love our child and their name has grown on us by the time you’ve seen us. Let us share that with you.
Our son will spit, be told by his mother “no, please do not spit,” and then do it again when he notices me stifling laughter. I am solidly in the camp that I think babies can intuit more about the personal circumstances around them than we give them credit for, but I am not confident this speaks to his long-term personality.
Maybe it does, though, and you’ll find some people who swear it is predictive. Either way, parents love to guess. We extrapolate and dream because we are excited about the unknown future nature of this small person. If you ask us this creative question, we’ll at least think about some funny anecdotes and relay them to you in our answer.
One fascinating thing about newborns is they change every week and sometimes every day. This morning my wife and I went to pick up our son and we both paused for a moment and had the same thought - his mouth looks a little different today. He also has started rolling over every morning this week. And he discovered how to spit last weekend.
And parents care about these milestones. We need something like this to feel like we’re making progress. Asking a new parent this question is guaranteed to get you a funny anecdote (or two) about a way the kid surprised anyone watching this week.
Better than nothing but this is too open-ended. What do you want us to tell you? That we aren’t sleeping? That we love this child but miss the freedom before we became parents? That we have no idea what we are doing? We’re exhausted - you need to lead the witness a bit more.
Unless you are pretty close personal friends, with the kind of relationship that would permit this question, please avoid it. It has been truly bizarre to me how many people who barely know us asked this.
Look, we aren’t opposed. My wife breastfed our son. We just know that it is both a personal choice and something that can be really arduous to impossible for a mother. Sometimes the emotions or burden of the process can be overwhelming. Sometimes it just doesn’t work. The last thing that you want is to make someone feel like they are failing because of the biology outside of their control.
And besides, people who are breastfeeding advocates will be very, very vocal about it anyway. If they are fans of it you will hear about it. A lot. Trust me.
C’mon! We are barely sleeping, our old life we thought was busy seems tranquil now, and we can barely make plans beyond the next hour. The last thing we want to chat about is doing this all over again on a slightly harder mode because at that point we’ll have a toddler running around.