Tips on Fatherhood
Stuff I wish I could have read about before becoming a dad.
It’s hard.
Everyone will tell you that. It’s pretty much the hardest thing you’ll ever do. But the parts that are hard are not necessarily intuitive.
First off, the poop and pee things are really not that big a deal. You’ll get used to it. If you wear a black shirt you’ll end the day looking like a Jackson Pollock painting with white splotches of spit-up. Spit up is the nice thing to call baby vomit — have I yet mentioned that babies nearly continuously vomit curdled milk? You’ll soon have a cologne of cottage cheese following you everywhere. But you won’t mind it.
It’s sleep that you’ll miss. Because when you’re poorly slept, everything is actually harder and — emotionally — it feels much much harder. So you need to first and foremost optimize for sleep.
You’re going to need to head to bed a lot earlier than you’re used to. The old adage “when the kids sleep, so should you” needs to apply until you are rested enough to walk in a straight line. This probably means lights out by 10pm because you’ll need to be up at 7am and are likely to be up a few times in the night from your wife pumping, you changing and re-swaddling the kid, etc. You may be up 2–3 times a night every night for a few months. Yes, the Geneva Convention considers that kind of sleep deprivation unlawful torture.
Now here’s a cool trick I haven’t heard much talked about: night doulas. Also called night nannies, these magical individuals come to your home ~10pm and sit with your sleeping infant through the night. If the kid wakes up hungry they can either bring them to your wife to feed and then take them back, burp them, change them, etc. — or they can feed the baby from a bottle to orthogonalize schedules from when your wife will wake up with uncomfortably full breasts and need to express. Either way, it’s kind of magic for actually getting restful sleep and being able to see straight the next day. A great night doula can help encourage the kid to sleep through the night by comforting but not feeding the kid to encourage them to re-settle, and can provide feedback about how the kid is doing, tips to help them do better, etc.
The second thing you need to look after for your sanity is exercise. Finding a gym with a kids’ club is ideal; especially one that takes young kiddos. We tried using the 24 Hour Fitness here in Redwood City, but their kid’s club is perennially understaffed, which means there was a 50/50 chance that the club would just be full and then you have to wait (30–90 minutes) for an opening, or just go home. But when you figure it out a good family gym routine, it’s magic. We ended up going with PCC just up the hill from us. It was a fair chunk more expensive than 24H, but it has proven fantastic, with a beautiful Olympic pool and a huge, well-staffed kids’ area that takes kids as young as three month (and largely run by members, so your kids’ care is excellent).
One of the most important things to grok is that kids are pretty robust. Many men panic at first holding a child, but you’ll see second-time dads master one-handed grasps with ease. As long as you don’t try to hurt the kid and keep them from doing something obviously bad (like tumbling out of a second story window), they’ll probably be okay. If babies were delicate, you wouldn’t be here.
This insight will make you a better dad, because it enables you to jump in with gusto to help with the kiddo instead of playing it safe, staying on the sidelines, and pissing off your wife who is already putting in a full time job amount of work just to sustain your kid. If you want to sleep well through the night (remember the earlier parts about this being all about sleep?) you’ll want to swaddle your kiddo real tight, and this is something you may be able to do better than your partner. If you haven’t heard about The Five S’s then go get educated ASAP. It’s a little unintuitive that wrapping a baby very tightly will make them happy and cozy, but it’s real.
Get a sound machine. We use the Dohm ($45). Put one in your room and one in your kid’s room. This is a very straightforward way to “buy better sleep” for everyone. Magic.
529: You can set up a 529 account for your kiddo to begin saving for educational spending as soon as they have their social security number. I happen to use TD Ameritrade College Savings after having reviewed a number of 529 plans. Both you and babymomma can each contribute up to $14,000/year/kid to an account (this is the IRS gift limit; other family members can also contribute up to this amount). Unfortunately, contributions are post-tax and are not deductible in California, but the accounts appreciate tax-free provided withdrawals are only made for qualified educational expenses.
DCAP: As a couple, you can set aside up to $5,000/year in pretax dollars for qualified child care expenses as part of a Dependent Care Assistance Program. (This is also sometimes called a Dependent Care FSA.) There is a very wide range of valid expenses (nanny, preschool, etc) so this is definitely worth doing and maxing out.
Insurance. Now that you have heirs (!), it’s time to make sure that they’re provided for if you and your spouse kick the bucket before they’re fully autonomous adults. Step one is to get yourself some 30-year term life insurance ASAP if you’re healthy; that’s when it’s cheap! Make sure there are appropriate riders for e.g. scuba diving or general aviation if you’re planning on doing those things — otherwise the policies won’t be valid if they were the cause of your untimely demise. Your workplace may also offer voluntary supplementary life insurance but even if you exercise this, don’t take this as a stand-in for a non-employer based 30-year insurance policy. I use MetLife.
Will & Trust. But it’s still a mess if you die if that’s all that you do because your heirs are going to have to go through this awful thing called probate — basically a long and painful automatic lawsuit filed on your death — to figure out who gets what and under what terms. You want to avoid probate as a way of being polite to your next-of-kin, so A) have a legally drafted, executed, witnessed Will, and B) have your assets in a trust. A trust is a wacky legal construct; you can think of it like a very very lightweight corporation. It’s its own legal entity separate from you but controlled by you and your spouse. So step one is to create this entity (with the help of an estate attorney) and step two is to “fund it” by effectively gifting all of your assets to the trust. Many people do step one but forget to do step two, so all of their stuff goes through probate. Whoops. That moots the point of most of this. I used Adam Evan to do our estate plan, which as a very reasonable fixed price included our Wills, Powers of Attorney, Nomination of Guardians (important: who raises your kids?), Advance Health Care Directive (do you want to be a vegetable?) and fun legal detritus like HIPAA Authorizations. He also took care of putting our house into the trust, which makes a lot of sense as it’s our most valuable single asset. This is a reasonable time to also think about getting a sturdy fireproof safe installed and bolted to the floor; put your key documents like your Wills inside and ensure your estate’s executors have got the combination. This is recommended versus a safety deposit box at a bank, which is considerably more involved for an executor to access than a safe in your home to which they have the combo.
Paternity Leave: The United States is a really backwards place in some aspects. We’re one of the only developed countries on Earth to not guarantee parents any time off with their newborn. But if you’re lucky enough to work for a company that does offer paternity leave, you’ll want to work with your manager and HR to figure out how to make the most of it. Most importantly, you shouldn’t let it go to waste! Most paternity leave plans expire on the kiddo’s first birthday, meaning any unused days will vanish. The ideal seems to be taking a block of time to help with the few weeks right after the birth (the first four weeks are just a big, blurry mess honestly), a week to help ease things back in when your wife goes back to work, and if you have anything left over, a chunk of time when the kid is, say, nine months old and starting to be really fun and interactive.
Health Insurance: Don’t forget to add your new kid to your company’s health insurance plan ASAP! A birth counts as a “qualifying event” to enable you to change your overall benefits elections, so it’s a good chance to review whether your prior benefits are still an appropriate fit for your new family — and if they’re not, you can change them. The paperwork can get super challenging if you take more than 30 days after the birth to add your new dependent and make your election, so jump on this.
Documentation: If your kid was born at a hospital, you will typically be seen by the hospital’s recorder, who will file notice of the birth with the county, offer to publish an abbreviated notice in the local newspaper, and to file for a social security card. It will take about four weeks for the social security card to show up and about the same amount of time for the county to have your kid’s birth certificate ready. Once you have a birth certificate in hand, it’s a good idea to think about putting in for your kid’s passport. Even if you’re not planning on traveling internationally in the immediate future, a passport is a very handy document for your child to have to establish identity authoritatively and it’s much easier to renew a passport than to apply for a new one. (You’ll need to renew a child passport after five years; adults are good for ten.) Both parents ideally need to show up in person to apply. The only remaining thing you’ll need is an infant passport photo: I’ve found that Costco is the best place to get these done. Many places that offer passport photography won’t do infants, but Costco does. If you get the photograph done in their first few weeks it’s even okay if their eyes are closed. Don’t apply for a passport at the post office — you might not even be able to be seen for a month if you make an appointment; we used our county clerk’s office and we were in and out in less than five minutes with no appointment. Super rad. For extra bonus points, once you have your kid’s passport you can enroll them in Global Entry, though you’ll still have to wait like six months for an interview. And yes, having CBP officers interview your baby about their terrorist affiliations and prior activity is pretty hilarious. “Are you a terrorist?”
“Gooo! Hoo hooo! [drool]”
“I’ll take that as a no.”
Friends: Your social profile will change a little. Out go your pals who you connected with over late night benders in the city and in with the friendly couple down the block who always looked underslept with kiddo in tow. It happens. Do your best to stay connected while you’re in “the baby cave” of the first year of life — both online and having friends come over after the kids go down. Suck it up and go to that two-year-old’s birthday party. Embrace befriending other parents over your kids. It’s okay.
Car: Yep, you might need a “family car”, especially when the second kid hits. We have a Subaru Outback. While there are a lot of reasonable choices out there, I challenge you to find anyone with a family and a Subaru who is unhappy with the decision. $30k new, AWD for the snow, and with lane assist and adaptive cruise control the dang thing practically drives itself on the highway. Yes, a $120k Tesla can do that too (and more), but at 4x the cost.
I hope you found these tips useful. If you have feedback, typo-fixes, or any things that could have been in here and weren’t, please email me at david@weekly.org and I’ll put them in. Feel free to reshare, with attribution.
