10 quick tips for new parents

The arrival of a baby for new parents means a radical change in their lives, for which they are often not prepared. This is normal, since their day-to-day life changes after birth, and adapting to the new situation implies facing many challenges with which we have no previous experience.

Since no one is born taught, it is important that parents who have just had their first child learn all those things that are going to be important to their lives from now on. So let's see a collection of mini-tips for new parents in which we will emphasize mental health and emotion management.

Quick Tips for New Parents

These are the main tips that we should take into account as new parents when it comes to ensure both the well-being and correct development of the child as well as our own quality of life.

1. Don't neglect your health

The first piece of advice that we should follow as new parents is not to neglect their own health, since parents with problems of this type will have more problems when it comes to raising their children. After all,

physical and mental health is linked to our ability to pay attention to the needs of the moment and react to them fluidly.

To maintain healthy daily habits we must continue to maintain, as far as possible, all those activities and habits that we carried out before the birth of our child or daughter.

These habits include a healthy diet, correct personal hygiene habits and also doing sports on a daily or weekly basis. In addition to that, it is also important to maintain leisure habits that help us stay motivated and happy during the week.

• Related article: "10 psychologically healthy daily habits, and how to apply them to your life"

2. Do not nip your social life in the bud

In this sense, it is important to keep a social life that is not much less rich than the one we had before the birth of the child. This means that we should not root out meetings with friends; Not only is it a measure that helps prevent mental health problems (the possibility of talking with others about our feelings is very important), but it In addition, we will be able to learn valuable information about first-time fatherhood and get to know other points of view about the problems we face in the face of the challenge of breeding.

Staying with dear friends and family will allow us to have a good quality of life, have external support that can help us with our child and have good mental health.

3. Distribute daily responsibilities

Ensuring a fair and equitable sharing of household responsibilities and also those related to baby care is also essential. so that both parents work equally and no asymmetries arise.

It is important that there is proper communication between the parents, since the fact of not talking about these issues can cause a person to end up carrying too much work and conflicts arise in the couple.

The teamwork of the parents will help family life to be satisfactory between both parties and the baby is always well cared for and cared for, as it does not suffer so many ups and downs typical of the accumulation of work and stress.

• You may be interested in: "Stress due to parenting tasks: causes and consequences"

4. Do not obsess over the psychological development of the baby

It is also important that you do not become obsessed with controlling everything that surrounds the child's daily life. For example, being constantly aware of the music that is heard at home, the colors that predominate in the home, etc.

Although new parents tend to become obsessed with protecting their children and with To optimize your exposure to situations tailored to your developmental needs, it is important to maintain calm and trusting both one's own parenting skills and the resilience of babies when experiencing unpleasant situations. Their psychological development is not as fragile as many people believe.

5. Find out with criteria: quality better than quantity

Informing yourself as much as possible is also important to acquire knowledge about all those issues that concern us or about which we have doubts as new parents. Now, if you spend most of your free time trying to inform yourself as a parent, not only will you not be better equipping yourself to perform well in parenting, but you will you will be missing the opportunity to "filter" that advice separating the well-founded ones from the rest and to learn from the interaction with your baby.

We can inform ourselves with any of the thousands of specialized books on maternity and child care, the important thing is not to become obsessed or overinformed; the latter will lead us to give great importance to erroneous beliefs that have been propagated through sensationalism.

6. Share doubts

In the same way that we inform ourselves, it is also important to share our doubts with those people who can help us, be they friends, professionals or relatives close. It not only benefits us, but, in many cases, it can even serve to strengthen ties and so that other people feel better for helping us by giving us their experience.

However, we must also learn to establish a limit with those people who want to help us, since sometimes they can make the mistake of being too heavy or invasive.

7. organize your time

Organizing one's own time is essential to be able to carry out all the new tasks and activities for which we must take responsibility as new parents.

In the first few weeks it is common for us to find it difficult to organize time well and take advantage of it to combine our daily life with childcare. The organization is something that is learned over time and that we must improve maintaining well-defined schedules and that are visible (for example, under a magnet on the fridge).

• Related article: "Time management: 13 tips to make the most of the hours of the day"

8. Organize the expenses

Just as it is common not to have a good organization of time, with the first child it can also happen that we spend more than expected, since many times we do not know which products are essential and which are not are.

Therefore, in order to optimize our finances and get the most out of them without spending too much, it is recommended make a list with all the essential products that we should buy and; In this way you will have a global vision of the priority of each purchase.

9. Manage visits

Another of the issues that we must keep in mind is that of visits, since during the first weeks many well-known people will want to stay with us to meet the creature.

To avoid saturating ourselves with the visit of friends and family It is advisable to go to their homes instead of them coming to visit us, since in this way we can have control at all times and leave when we want, without suffering a tension between the needs of our child and social pressure.

10. Have care materials ready

If your son or daughter is very young, it is worth having care materials well organized, such as diapers, talcum powder, etc. This will prevent you from constantly exposing yourself to Stress-generating situations in which you must go to another room, leaving the child in a not very safe part of the house without your supervision.