Parental Thread

[badgerx3]

Congrats 6793026. 44 hours in the hospital sounds miserable especially for wifey. I hope everyone is atleast settled in at home now and enjoying (or surviving) new born life.

To share some personal experiences, I agree with other users that the insistence on breast milk is somewhat overboard. Similarly, my wife had issues with producing milk in the start. Amongst other things, post-partum, it spiralled her mental health, especially being a new parent.

We looked into the tongue tie thing as well, but eventually our little guy figured it out before we pursued anything further. However, the above experience, atleast in my opinion, could've been avoided if they weren't so pushy on the whole breast milk ideology.

As a result of all of this, my wife pumped like crazy over the first 6-8 months after birth, thinking our little guy would starve. My little guy stopped taking to the bottle after the 3rd month, so here we are with a stockpile of frozen milk that probably is no longer usable lol.

I know it's easy for us guys (aka the husband) to say don't worry about it, but I can only imagine the mental anguish a mother goes thru when something so essential and primitive to human life, she cannot do.

[Traum]

Originally Posted by 6793026

i do have the luxury of working from home so hoping I can still ttake care of the child and skip daycare.

Don't forget that daycare is also essential to the child's development because they need to learn socialization with their peers. Even if one of the parents is a stay-at-home parent, I'd say insist on sending the child to daycare.

If I have 2 kids, I'd still send both to daycare.

If I have 3, then it gets too expensive, and I'd say one of the parents should just become a full time stay-at-home parent to look after the kids. Plus at that point with 3, there are enough of them to learn socialization together.

[westopher]

If you want to take care of the kid and work from home, expect to get approximately 1 hour of work per 8 hour day, MAX.

[EvoFire]

Originally Posted by 6793026

Babies don't NEED much, it's the parents. I like what EvoFire said - use the money from private school for trips. That's a great rebuttal and true. I rather take my kid to go to HK with that money saved. I came from public school and I turned out fine. Wife is private and went to become top student all of Ontario (no joke) and a health care professional. SO it's a tough balance on what's good and bad.

i do have the luxury of working from home so hoping I can still ttake care of the child and skip daycare.

Go sign up for daycare. Unless you don't want to get any work done during the day and work after the kid goes to bed every night. Depending on the kid, you don't get any reprieve until they are 3, but realistically closer to 5.

My son is turning 6 in Sept. He's in his last day of kindy today. He only can self entertain for 70% of the day until recently. Before that he'll be constantly needing attention. I still had to tell him to go away cause I was trying to solve a technical problem and he kept babbling in my office

My daughter is 2.5y old. She is roughly 40% independent in that she can focus and play for pretty good stretches which is a lot better than my son (girl boy differences). But then she's also stopped napping at home and 1-2pm when the nap bug hits is very taxing for us.

So it's great to be able to spend time with them, send them to daycare unless you don't have work.

Originally Posted by Traum

Don't forget that daycare is also essential to the child's development because they need to learn socialization with their peers. Even if one of the parents is a stay-at-home parent, I'd say insist on sending the child to daycare.

If I have 2 kids, I'd still send both to daycare.

If I have 3, then it gets too expensive, and I'd say one of the parents should just become a full time stay-at-home parent to look after the kids. Plus at that point with 3, there are enough of them to learn socialization together.

I would only partially agree with this. I had that thought as well for a long time, but we are seeing friend's who have kept their kids at home and they are socializing fine. But they do have larger families and they see people outside of their nuclear family regularly

Originally Posted by westopher

If you want to take care of the kid and work from home, expect to get approximately 1 hour of work per 8 hour day, MAX.

Maybe not that extreme, maybe 2.5h/8

[badgerx3]

When wifey and I learned we were expecting, I was WFH full-time at that point in time. Wifey initially thought it would be OK if I didn't take any parental leave since I was able to WFH and my job was pretty flexible.

It was only my manager who insisted I take time off that made me decide to take the first 6 months off. In hindsight, I sure am glad I took that advice. We were living in a 1BR apartment so when I eventually returned back to work, it was manageble at first but when they start becoming mobile it was quite the task to balance working but also keeping my little guy entertained, regardless of the size of the space.

Long story short, similarly to you, I thought by being able to WFH we could save some money on child care and such. Now that I am in the thick of it, I do not believe that is possible, even if both parents are WFH. Fortunately, right now, wifey is staying at home to be able to provide child care. But even then, there are times where it becomes too much for her and she needs a break, even if she doesn't say she does.

[RabidRat]

Originally Posted by Traum

Don't forget that daycare is also essential to the child's development because they need to learn socialization with their peers. Even if one of the parents is a stay-at-home parent, I'd say insist on sending the child to daycare.

Originally Posted by EvoFire

I would only partially agree with this. I had that thought as well for a long time, but we are seeing friend's who have kept their kids at home and they are socializing fine. But they do have larger families and they see people outside of their nuclear family regularly

I read that til something like 2.5 ish years old, kids don't really socialize with other kids: til then, they're picking that up via interaction with adults.

So the advantage of daycare really picks up after that point. Before then, there's a lot of positive effect from focused & undivided interaction w/ adults.

That's not necessarily realistic though. I thought about taking off work til both kids hit 2.5 years old but damn, that's a serious sacrifice.

[Traum]

Most daycares -- at least here in Vancouver -- don't take children younger than 2.5 yrs old though. And I agree that when the child is too young -- let's just use 3 yrs old as tthe watershed age, even though we all know it isn't black and white, the socialization benefits from daycare isn't really there.