Whether you’ve enlisted or been drafted, you are now officially in the game soldier. Dad/drill instructor Ben Smithurst explains how to get to that first birthday.
1. Basic training is … basic. Don’t sweat it too hard
Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (Full Metal Jacket) If you ladies leave my island, if you survive recruit training, you will be a weapon. You will be a minister of death praying for war. But until that day, you are pukes.
Look, nappy changes and bottle feeding and deciding on a crap name that’ll ruin your kid’s life forever are all important but here’s the thing: you’re genetically programmed to sort those things out.
The freaking out you’re doing about them is a little like the stress you carried around as a virgin before you managed to get over the line — real at the time, but retrospectively kinda amusing.
Babies are harder to break than you think. You’ll muddle through, and before you know it, you will be a weapon. In fact, as WWII US President Franklin Roosevelt said, the only thing you really have to fear is fear itself. Which brings us to…
2. Have a strategy to avoid shell shock
Lieutenant George: Oh, sir, if we should happen to tread on a mine, what do we do?
Captain Blackadder: Well, normal procedure, Lieutenant, is to jump up 200 feet into the air and scatter yourself over a wide area.
As a new dad, you’ll kick a dozen figurative landmines every week, and most of them will scatter your component parts across the Western Front of bewilderment that is your life now.
Remarkably, you’ll recover, because child-rearing isn’t actually war! Understanding this is actually the lesson: don’t panic.
I’m a reasonably calm person, I think, although my partner is not so reliable in an emergency. (When I accidentally cut my finger off, I had to drive myself to the hospital while she dry-retched in the passenger seat.)
But all the sleep deprivation and dunno-what-you’re-doing stress and five-hour screaming tantrums get on top of you. Badly.
In its worst outcomes, these scenarios can lead to some dads shaking their babies which can and probably will kill them. If you’re that stressed, you need to step away first, and consider calling MensLine (1300 789978).
But even in less dramatic scenarios, the freaking-out lack-of-perspective makes normal things impossible.
As neuroscientist Daniel Levitin notes, “your brain has evolved over millennia to release cortisol in stressful situations, inhibiting rational, logical thinking”. You need coping mechanisms.
Levitin’s TED talk on keeping calm is 12 minutes of worthwhile viewing if you’re into that sort of thing. But regardless of the source, learn to take a deep breath and re-centre in every situation that goes to shit.
3. Have the right ordinance
The Rifleman’s Creed, US Marine Corps: This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life.
Look, Full Metal Jacket doesn’t end well for ol’ Vincent D’Onofrio’s character — maybe cinema’s most famous enthusiast for The Rifleman’s Creed — but substitute ‘thermometer’ for ‘rifle’ and your first year as a dad will have shitloads less Kubrick-level drama.
You’ve probably heard the rule-of-thumb that your baby will go to hospital at least once in its first 12 months, and if you were anything like us, you probably thought that was bullshit. Well, good news: it is!
According to the Medical Journal of Australia, around 18 in 100 kids below the age of one in NSW are readmitted to hospital once they’re checked out the first time. Which is little comfort when fever rears its head at 2.30am.
In this instance, your thermometer is worth its weight in gold and 100,000 times its weight in AK-47s. You need one, it needs to have charge (digital ones are easier) and you need to know where it is at 2.35am, and how to use it.
Does yours go under the tongue, or under the arm, in the ear, or, er, anally? How will the readings differ at each location, and how do you compute your baby’s actual temperature from the number on the readout?
There’s good information here about fevers in children. Print out this PDF to keep on the fridge. (You might also want to have a bag on stand-by — not for kid’s stuff, but for yours and your partners: a book, a spare phone charger, change for the coffee machine. As previously noted, when you visit emergency with your feverish kid you will be there awhile.)
A good soldier knows all his tools, from the change table to fitting the baby seat to the car. But the thermometer is your rifle, and your rifle is your best friend.
More: Seven bugs your baby will catch in the first year. Probably.
4. Don’t engage on their terms
Sun Tzu: The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
For a late sixth century BC general, Sun Tzu has some great advice for raising kids. For example, don’t fight if you don’t have to. And I speak specifically here of the battle to get the kid to sleep.
Our first kid slept, as recommended, in our room when we got home, in a crib beside our bed. Four months in, however, he was moved to his own room (albeit just along the hall, with open doors between us).
I recommend this. Establish boundaries early. Buy a baby monitor, whatever. But! For thereon in, each momentary cry or unsettled twitch I heard would see me leaping out of bed in milliseconds, like a spring-loaded ninja, and racing in to try and pat him back to sleep before he could properly waken.
I’m a light sleeper, but you’re genetically tuned to that frequency anyway. It was a mistake. Often, the kid will go back to sleep in a minute or so if left alone, but I took another four months to figure this out. Don’t fight battles you might win anyway.
5. If the cavalry can’t come to you, go to the cavalry
Jon Snow (Game of Thrones): We’re standing here because of you. The battle was lost until the Knights of the Vale rode in.
War is hell and raising a kid under one isn’t heller, but it can still be pretty hellish. Oftentimes, all will seem lost — and on those cases, you need reinforcements. Because there’s no greater rebuttal to the weird, right-wing shock-jock idea that single mothers pump out kids to get free TVs than raising a kid as a couple with no support close to hand. It’s gruelling.
Research indicates that kids raised with less family support do worse psychologically, emotionally and physically all the way to college age. If that’s not true here, too, I’ll eat a howitzer.
I live in Sydney, in a nice place we battled for years to get a toehold on. Neither of us has family closer than four hours away, and if we leave Sydney, we’ll never afford to move back. Even so, we have another kid on the way, and we’re leaving. At considerable cost to career prospects and all the rest.
If you don’t live near grandparents, or siblings, or cousins, and you like where you are, by all means try to stick it out. But if we’d done this earlier, I’d be saner now. Just saying. Being able to drop the kid off at Grandma’s for an hour or two is worth a week of shore leave.
6. Sometimes, you’re the reinforcements
Dolph Lundgren (Universal Soldier): Goddamn it, the whole f*cking platoon’s dropping like flies! What the hell are you staring it? Do you have any idea what it’s like out there? Do you?
When she’s still on maternity leave, you may think that because you’re helping out constantly at home, then also going to work all day, you’re doing it harder than she is. This is tempting but also not true. She’s the one in the field. A lot of the time, you’re just a no-nothing observing battle from way beyond the front lines.
I know this because, pre-baby, we’d planned that I’d quit my job and do the daddy daycare thing and she’d go back to work. I was as naïve as any green, war movie enthusiast who ever enlisted. I eventually had to admit that I didn’t have the stones or the skills.
Have no doubt that her day has been shittier than yours, and this line will earn you the dadding equivalent of a chest full of medals: “I’ll leave work early, I’m bringing home dinner and I’m going to take the kid to the park as soon as I walk in”.
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