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Class OverviewWelcome to Parenthood! I hope you are ready for the ride of your life. You will experience the highest highs and the lowest lows, there a few things you ought to know for the first year of Parenthood. (Check out the Top 10 Big Ideas from the class below!) Your ProfessorChris White, MD, is a pediatrician, parent educator, and life coach. He is the creator and director of Essential Parenting, an organization that emphasizes the psycho-emotional development of children and their parents.How to Survive the First Year of ParenthoodWelcome to Parenthood! I hope you are ready for the ride of your life. You will experience the highest highs and the lowest lows, the deepest bliss and possibly the most painful dissatisfaction of your life. I wouldn’t change it for the world, but there a few things I think you ought to know to help you through the first year. Here are my 10 Big Ideas The Top 10 Big Ideas1Shift Into Service Now that you are a parent, it is time to shift your perspective. This is a huge challenge. You will be exhausted. You will be pushed past your edge everyday. And you will be asked to put someone else’s needs over yours again and again. It is really hard. But it is also awesome. You have a front row seat to watching a human being grow up right before your eyes and get to fall in love again! And just as cool, you are also being grown up at the same time. Nature, God, Spirit—whatever you call it—intends for us to be grown up and matured through this transition. If you can shift your mindset from one of “what can I get” to “how can I serve,” you will put yourself in a state of flow rather than frustration. This shift into service will help you grow more as a person and become a better parent.2Let Yourself Be Held People will come out of the woodwork when your newborn arrives. Family, friends, neighbors all love to be around a home that has just welcomed a new baby. Let people take care of you. Let them make meals for you. Set up a calendar before the baby comes where someone is dropping off food about every other day. Let people run errands for you to the store. Seriously, they love helping out in whatever way they can and this lets you nest. You are going to need a lot of holding. Practice receiving support so that you can more effectively, in turn, support your partner and your child.3Facilitate Healthy Attachment One of the most important things you can do for your child’s development and to create harmony and intimacy in your home is to facilitate healthy attachment. Attachment can be thought of as the healthy forms of connection that humans need in order to survive and thrive. Mounds of research have been done and the verdict is clear: when these healthy connections don’t occur there are all kinds of repercussions for the child’s development and for the health of the family. For the first year, our main task is to create a womb-like environment so that our child feels held. We are trying to preserve her natural state of basic trust as much as possible. Reducing the level of stimulation is very important. Excessive stimulation leads to charge being stored in your infant’s nervous system and then she has to work harder and employ defenses to regulate herself. Also key is keeping her close to you. Get a sling and wear her around as you go about your daily activities. Breastfeed if possible. Have the baby sleep close by you rather than in another room. Be responsive to her needs. The continuity of your presence sets the stage for the deeper layers of attachment that are still yet to come. 4Know The 5 S’s One of your infant’s most important developmental tasks in the first year is to begin regulating the flow of energy through his body. This is called self-regulation. Healthy attachment is an important facilitator of this skill. Additionally, there are five things that parents have been doing instinctively for eons to calm their babies that help them become regulated, and in turn help facilitate their ability to regulate themselves in the future. Pediatrician Harvey Karp calls these “the 5 S’s:” swaddling, side/stomach lying, shushing, swinging, and sucking.   Each of these activities help calm the infants nervous system when he is dysregulated and clearly uncomfortable. Becoming more proficient at soothing him when he is dysregulated is huge. Your child feels safer and becomes more capable of self-regulation in the future. You feel more competent as a parent and “lean in” to your role rather than wanting to disappear. And the house becomes a little more restful and harmonious when you have the tools you need to soothe your baby in difficult times. Join us for the class and I will go through each of these in more detail. 5Share The Love (And The Pain) One of the coolest things about becoming a parent is that you really key in on other parents and bond in this new reality. You see a dad changing his baby girl in the bathroom and you can’t help but smile. You see a mom bouncing her crying baby at the park and you feel the suffering in both of them, but you also feel an outpouring of empathy: you know what she is going through. Camaraderie is a really important aspect of support in parenthood. So commiserate about the sleepless nights with other parents at the park. Laugh about all the dark thoughts you had at 3am when you just couldn’t get your little one calm. Share the sweetest little things that your baby just started doing with each other. Sharing the love and the pain is a great way to feel connected to the tribe we call “parents.”   6Accept Changes To Your Body Most parents I know undergo a big change in their bodies as they enter parenthood (I know ladies, this is massive masculine understatement!). Women by necessity gain weight, but even the guys tend to get a little bigger when their child arrives. And many of us feel a loss of vitality and energy. And our sex life? Well, lets just say it might be a tad different than the honeymoon, no-kid phase. Now of course this isn’t true for everybody, and it doesn’t have to be. But I think these changes are common, and perhaps natural. Most importantly, it can be really helpful if we accept these changes to our body rather than becoming frustrated at our little tyke for “taking away my vitality and my ripped young body.” Definitely do what you can to stay healthy and keep your relationship vital and sexy. But marry these intentions to a healthy dose of acceptance to the new reality. 7Look Out For Triggers You are almost guaranteed to have old wounds triggered in your parenting. There are so many events that live buried in our unconscious psyche—our shadow—that come out during ordinary parenting events. Some people get triggered when their baby cries, others when their baby is getting all the attention, and some when they see their baby breastfeeding. This is a whole class in and of itself, but keeping the shadow in mind when you are parenting can save you from acting out in really hurtful ways.  8Self Care Your primary task now is to take care of your baby. But how can you do that if you are completely depleted, frustrated, and lonely? As paradoxical as it sounds, we must take care of ourselves first (to a degree) before we can offer our infant the true depth of love that she deserves. Remember: the heart pumps blood to itself first so it can continue taking care of the entire body. You are your child’s lifeline. Don’t suffocate yourself. Take walks with friends. Get some exercise. Have a date with your partner from time to time. Your baby needs to see some vitality in the eyes of her parents. 9Trust Yourself and The Process One of the biggest problems with parenting today is the perspective that we need to make development happen: that we have to push our kids along at an “appropriate” developmental pace. Trust me; nature is smarter than you when it comes to development. Notice that eating, engaging, smiling, cooing, babbling, crawling – all of these things occur naturally on their own. You do not need to make development happen. Maturation is a natural unfolding of an inner developmental plan written into the DNA of every child. Yes, that unfolding does require support and nourishment, but that is not the same as making something happen. The first year is an especially important time to get into the habit of trusting development. Your role is supportive, so focus on meeting your infant’s needs and let nature take care of the rest. 10Grow Through Merging Allow yourself to soak in the state of satiation. Watch your baby when she is feeding. At first there is “red” energy activation that drives her to get the breast or bottle. But as the milk starts to flow, relaxation washes through her nervous system. Feel this melting feeling directly. Let it sink into your pores. Allow the “merging gold” to reconnect you with a natural state of one-ness with everything. Our babies can teach us about our essential nature and further our growth as spiritual beings.