What about your dreams for your new one? Every parent has hopes and goals for how they see their baby’s first year unfolding… but what about yours?
- Connection
Spending quality time with your family is important – there’s a good chance that you spend a lot of time with the people you love… but, is it quality? Does an evening at home look something like this? Everyone settles onto the couch to enjoy a night of television watching, each one of you picks up your phone to scroll social media, missing half of the programme, as well as forgetting that you’re supposed to be hanging out with your family. It’s time to get back to basics – if you’re having a night in, try playing board games.
When it comes to building a healthy connection with your baby, skin to skin contact is an important factor. Make feeding time an opportunity for bonding, don’t watch the TV or scroll your phone while you do it. Make eye contact with baby.
- Development
Parents have to make a lot of decisions about their children, from their schooling to their clothing. Of course, some decisions are bigger than others. However, there are a lot of development milestones in the first year of life. The excitement of cutting teeth, rolling over, starting to crawl, and first words.
You might have hopes that your baby will develop quicker than others, but provided they are on track, you should be grateful. There’s no need to panic if you think they’re a bit behind, every baby develops at a different rate. You can always ask your GP if there’s anything you can do to help your baby’s development.
- Seek Joy
Life’s goal is joy, isn’t it? It’s difficult to imagine how you can capture it for yourself when you’re running around like a headless chicken looking after your working life and your home life, too. It’s all about finding the perfect balance. You have to work to live, so dedicate the time you’re at work to doing your job well. You can walk out at the end of the day, ready to spend time with your family and have adventures. What’s the point of having children if you can’t experience the joy they bring? You don’t want to miss all the firsts because you’re chained to a desk.
- Mindful
Unfortunately, children don’t come with an instruction manual (oh, how handy would that be?). Every parent just tries to make the best decisions for their family. If you think about it, you can probably come up with half a dozen things your parents did to ruin your life… that wasn’t their intention. So, if you want to avoid situations like this you will need to be mindful of the decisions you make. That means doing research and understanding what your decisions mean for your children, even as little babies who can’t yet walk. The decisions get more complicated as you progress, but for now… it might be cloth or disposable? Dummy or no dummy? Co-sleep or not? Make the right decisions for you and your baby’s development.
- Positive Expectations
Part of managing your expectations is understanding when you’re being positive and realistic and when you’ve gone too far trying to push your child in a direction they’re not interested in. Now, for the first year your expectations are easy – you expect the general development milestones to occur and you dream of what baby can be in the future. Remember, the decisions you are making now make a difference down the line. So, educate yourself on what development looks like so that you’re not worrying about your baby’s progress for nothing.
- Self-Care
Parents, especially new parents, are guilty of doing too much. You want your baby to have the best life – that’s normal. The problem with that, though, is that in all the hubbub you forget to look after yourself and other family members. Your baby won’t get the best from you if you don’t practice self-care. So, make time to hang out on your own, whether it’s an indulgent bubble bath, an afternoon of coffee with a friend or just reading a book – you need time to yourself, doing the things you love. So, don’t feel guilty about taking care of you. You need all the energy in the world to look after everyone else and like a mobile phone; you’ll need to recharge your battery. Give CircleCare App a try, its helps you to take care and motivate people around you right from your smart phone.
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