"Advice" for New Moms

I have several friends who are pregnant or who just had babies, so I wanted to write something to encourage them. This is partly because some asked for advice about specific issues, and partly because when you become a mom, tips and tricks from other moms can be so helpful as you start navigating a new relationship with a tiny human who can't communicate by talking and who is utterly dependent on you.

So, I started thinking about what kind of advice would be helpful. It soon became clear that this was difficult to determine, because sometimes, as a new parent, you just want someone to tell you what you should do. At the same time, there is nothing more annoying than people who freely tell you what to do when you haven't asked. There are so many exceptions to every pattern, and so many different types of parents and kids.

I started thinking about the best advice I'd ever been given as a parent, which turned out to be "Take care of yourself" more than anything about my kids. (Obviously, this applies to pursuing spiritual wholeness and caring for my physical needs AS WELL AS the needs of my children, not at the expense of my children. Phrased another way, my children should not be the center of my universe any more than I should be the center of my universe.)

And I remembered an interesting thing that happened a while ago. A friend asked, on Facebook, for advice regarding a specific issue with her newborn. The people who were most anxious to speak up and give her advice were parents like me: young and relatively inexperienced, with one or two or three small children. The older parents had little to no advice to offer. They simply offered encouragement and prayers for the new mom.

I began to realize that all the parenting posts I read are written by people who have just a few more years of experience than I do. Of course, this is partly generational, but I started wondering, where are the parenting blogs written by people whose kids are in their forties? (I'm actually asking this question, so if you know of any, feel free to let me know!) So many of the blogs that offer advice and solutions are written by people whose kids haven't grown up yet. And simple, long-term observation will show you that you can't judge by someone's child at two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve, fourteen, sixteen, or even eighteen, what that child will be like as an adult. Observation will also show you that some responsible, kind people have irresponsible, terrible kids, and vice versa.

So I want to know, what advice comes from parents with grown children? It seems like the best people to offer parenting advice are those whose kids are already living their adult lives. It seems like those people would really have some insights on what to do or not to do, if parenting were a formula where you could put a certain parenting style in to get certain types of children out.

But older, wiser, experienced parents do not have many answers. They may give occasional advice, they offer encouragement, they offer community because they can relate. When you tell a mom whose kids are grown and gone about how fun and precious your children are, she can relate. She'll tell you how wonderful these years are and how quickly they go by, how you blink and suddenly your children have aged two, five, ten years. When you talk about how hard it is, how some days you wonder if you're actually going crazy or if you'll ever sleep again, and how sometimes being a mommy is the loneliest job in the world even though you're with people all day, the older mom knows. She sympathizes; she makes you feel like it's okay to be weak because she tells you that having small children is hard, and she reminds you that someday it will be over.

When you want to know what you should do, when you ask for advice, these older moms may offer practical suggestions, but at the same time they will say something along these lines: You just have to figure out what works for your family. Try different techniques. Every child is different. You're doing a good job. Trust your instincts about your child. Pray a lot, and remember that God is in control and He loves you. Or sometimes, older parents will say that they don't have any advice at all, but that they will pray for you. They do not offer solutions, in the way that we like to look for an X-step solution for every problem.

I came to the conclusion that being a good parent takes a lot of prayer and reflection, but there are very few one-size-fits-all solutions. My guess is that if you're the kind of person who is reading mommy blogs and worrying about whether or not you're doing a good job, you probably are doing a good job. The moms who are clearly NOT doing a good job, whose kids are candidates for state removal, are probably not reading the latest research about how to stimulate their kids' brains or wondering which type of discipline is most loving AND effective at curbing children's natural selfishness.

All that to say... I don't actually have any advice for new moms.

No, wait, that's not quite true (hope I don't look like a hypocrite now!). Here we go:

1) Take care of yourself as well as your kids.

2) Find other moms to talk to, ones in your stage who can rejoice and commiserate and offer tips and tricks because they're in the middle of it, and ones who are older and have the wisdom, peace, and perspective that come from life experience and time spent with Jesus.

That's all.