How To Be A Good Father To Your Baby Daughter

In the mirror, though, I see Mr Bad Example. I see someone incorrigibly lazy, self-indulgent, quietly manipulative and in bad need of a shave. I see someone who can love his children to distraction - indeed, believes that they are the best thing that ever happened to him - while constantly thinking up new ways to get out of the house. Every evening, during the stressfest that is dinner-bath-bedtime, I fantasize about sitting in a pub quietly with a drink and a book. (When the family go away without me, that's what I do between 6.00 and 7.30 of an evening. Then I come back home, watch the telly by myself, go to bed early, sleep like a breezeblock. For a single man this sort of evening would make you want to top yourself. For me, it is the purest bliss.) 
 

How To Be A Good Father To Your Baby Daughter

I swear too much. I shout too much. Worse, I go from not shouting at all and talking in a very soft voice though an invisible fury barrier to shouting like a red-faced loon. All the books tell you that this is Very Bad Parenting Indeed.

I eat appallingly. (This paragraph has been prepared with the enthusiastic participation of Mrs Bad Example.) I don't go much on green vegetables and I adore refined sugars, especially whatever it is they put in Mars bars. And Mars bar ice cream. I am prone to defer to Mrs Bad Example on domestic matters, which (she tells me) is a disgraceful example to my son, who will grow up believing that only women cook proper meals. And I am unusually impractical in traditional male ways as well, being inept at all forms of DIY and liable, when things go wrong, to 'run around in circles like a headless chicken until someone else sorts it all out'. 

(At this point she paused, poured another large glass of red wine and then continued her list of my inadequacies, which I pretended both to listen to and to write down.) I'm sure you could produce an equally illuminating and humiliating list about yourself. 

But who gives a monkeys? As your child's first birthday party rages, as small children crawl and stagger around your house screaming and crying, as all the mums sit around eating cake and all the dads get quietly drunk, you know that you are at least good enough as a dad, and better than many, and that that's all that matters. You might almost say that all is for the best in the best of possible worlds, if some small person had not just come over to you and vomited on your trousers. To find out more, you can check out How To Be A Good Father To Your Baby Daughter.

How To Be A Good Father To A Newborn

To illustrate how fast the time goes: this will be the first and last birthday party for Junior that will be held primarily for the benefit of the parents. Next year your child will know exactly what's what, will be au fait with the concept of 'presents', and won't have to be coerced at gunpoint into blowing out candles on cakes. By the age of two children are very nearly playing with each other, which is to say, seeing something another child is playing with and grabbing it shouting 'Mine! Mine!' But at one, they are only dimly aware of other children, who are not really their friends yet, but the children of friends of their parents, which will never be the same thing, as I'm sure you remember.
 

How To Be A Good Father To A Newborn

At a first birthday party the kids wander around intrigued by the novelty of it all, while the parents chat away merrily and get a bit drunk. You'll love it.
 
Take a look at the other parents and their children. Even if you disregard similarities of height and weight and colouring and all that genetic guff, you may notice certain likenesses between them. For instance, a small girl may already have a similar hairstyle to her mother, or a small boy may have the same slightly pompous mannerisms as his father. We all assume our children will be like us, which is usually an assumption too far, as they are themselves right from the start. 

But it's around the first birthday that you can begin to see the effects of twelve months of nurture. First babies learn everything from their parents. (Second and subsequent babies learn more from their older siblings, but it all comes back to you in the end.) Oliver James, in his very fine book They F*** You Up, describes in grueling detail how quickly and comprehensively parents can screw up their children, but even if you haven't turned your infant into a schizophrenic you will already have had an enormous influence on the adult he or she will become. James says that most of the crucial work is already done in a year, although you probably can't see it yet. Nevertheless, you can begin to see it in other people and their children, if you look for it. Worse, they can begin to see it in you.
 

Whoa there. Is this Judgement Day? Will all your wrongdoings be brought to account? Junior may have acquired some of your strange little habits, but that doesn't necessarily point to a future of vagrancy and heroin addiction. This is why the theory of Good Enough Parenting is so comforting and popular. This accepts that nobody is perfect and, moreover, that nobody would want to be, because the 'perfect' parent who got everything right would be a pain in the arse. Far better to be Good Enough, to acknowledge that you are a flawed human being who is going to cock things up from time to time, and if you are happy with that you can get on with the job of parenting without passing on all your anxieties to your children. I think I know in my heart that I am Good Enough. To find out more, you can check out How To Be A Good Father To A Newborn.

When Does Life Get Better After Having A Baby

Contradiction, though, lies at the heart of parenthood. So does unpredictability. One day, and this could happen any time after Junior's first birthday, she will start smiling at you again. Weirder still, flirting with you again. She will say complimentary things to you when you are least expecting it (such as when you are awake). She will make faint suggestions during commercial breaks that she might respond favorably to your sexual advances. She will poke tiny holes in all your condoms. She will want your sperm again, and when you are drunk she will probably have it.
 

When Does Life Get Better After Having A Baby

For as Junior learns to crawl and begins literally to move beyond babyhood, your beloved will feel a yearning for another one. Her amnesia is complete, her glasses are tinted with rose. You can show her slides of the first birth, or selected video highlights; nothing will budge her. This time will be different, she will say. And besides, little Arbuthnot/Iolanthe needs a playmate. Much as you will need to find the money to buy somewhere bigger to live, a larger car and oodles more stuff to keep the family in the style to which it has become accustomed before you peg out with a coronary in 15 years' time.

Don't blame her. It is her body talking. Just as your male body tells you to impregnate as many women as you can, her female body tells her to make the most of your male body before you peg out with a coronary in 15 years' time.
 
And in the essentials she is right. The second birth usually is easier than the first. The female body is designed to give birth to lots of children. The first one is effectively a trial run. By the fourth or fifth they almost drop out of their own accord.

And while Arbuthnot or Iolanthe does not need a playmate as such, or even want one, they will certainly benefit from having one, and so will you. At first having two children is so much more exhausting that you will be astounded that you used to complain so much. All parents of two children say the same thing of all parents of one child:

'They don't know they're born.' (Incidentally, all parents of three children say the same thing of parents of two children.)

Once the youngest is about two, however, life starts to improve. Siblings will play together and with other children more willingly and happily than will only children. I know parents of only children who are still required to keep their charges 'entertained' for vast stretches of the day. Think about it: would you rather play football with your child for four hours, or would you rather watch your two children playing football with each other for four hours while you read a book and sip a mint julep?
 
And your relationship improves as well. As your children grow, so does your satisfaction in having done all this together and somehow survived it. Each of you realizes that this is the only other person in the world who loves your children as much as you do. It counts for a lot.
 
For second and subsequent births you and your partner will be much better prepared. If she wants to give birth at home in a pool surrounded by 40,000 candles while listening to Manuel And The Music Of The Mountains, then why shouldn't she? Meanwhile, you will know whether you want to be there or not. (If there are enough qualified and/or sympathetic womenfolk there, you might be able to wriggle out of it. As Kate Figes writes in Life After Birth: 'Throughout history all cultures that have excluded men from the scene of childbirth have done so because there is little for them actually to do.') I have left this revolutionary and possibly indictable suggestion in the reasonable hope that your partner won't have read this far. 

But this is for the future. Right now you have a party to host. To find out more, you can check out When Does Life Get Better After Having A Baby.