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Dude, You’re Gonna Be A Dad: All I want is a book I can give to my husband that focuses on his experience of the pregnancy. Instead, I get this sexist pile of bullcrap.
A truly astonishing percentage of this book is devoted to Dealing With Women And Their Incomprehensible Woman Feelings. Of course you, a man, do not have any feelings you need to talk about! You are a manly man! You care about football! And sex! And drinking! The most striking thing about all of this is that it isn’t clear to me that this book expects men to actually get any say in their relationships whatsoever. If you don’t want to go shopping for the birth announcement or participate in a baby shower or go to the doctors’ appointments, why not just say that? Like, first of all, some men like baby showers? And, second of all, if you despise baby showers that much, why not tell your wife? It is just this horrifying vision of a world where people are constantly forced to have their most intimate relationship with someone they can’t talk to and don’t particularly like.
While I too agree that large breasts are very nice, an advice book shouldn’t go hubba hubba about how big one’s wife’s breasts are more than, say, twice. And if your wife is literally producing your child, then it seems to me that you should do your fair share of chores without having to be bribed with sex to do so. And in a pregnancy book, I think it is wildly inappropriate to talk about the process of birth and associated medical procedures as if they are so disgusting men cannot possibly be expected to deal with them. If you can’t handle knowing what an episiotomy is, maybe you shouldn’t have a partner who might get one.
The Book of New Family Traditions: How To Create Great Rituals for Holidays and Everyday: I think that it’s problematic to refer to things as being neurotypical; after all, both neurodivergent and neurotypical people are very diverse, and it’s a mistake to assume that “unlike me” is the same thing as “NT”. Still, this book is aggressively neurotypical. A lot of the things the author considers to be Fun I would consider to be incredibly overstimulating and they would make me want to hide in a corner and cry.
Nevertheless, there are a lot of really cool ideas for holidays and rituals, if you can pick through the ones that wouldn’t work for you. A few I particularly liked: A mom bonded with her son, a college student who liked World of Warcraft, by playing with him, and eventually organized a birthday party for him in WoW with his guild; celebrating A A Milne’s birthday with small children who like Winnie the Pooh; reading a poem each day with your kids during April; a dad who brings his child’s stuffed animal with him on work trips and photographs the stuffed animal doing various fun things; giving a Miss Frizzle Award each month to the family member who has learned the most things through making the most mistakes.
The Game Theorist’s Guide to Parenting: How The Science of Strategic Thinking Can Help You Deal With The Toughest Negotiators You Know– Your Kids: Less a parenting advice book, more an introduction to game theory that happens to use parenting as a hook. Still pretty interesting.
The traditional “I cut, you choose” is provably optimal if there are only two people involved. Traditional turn-taking is often suboptimal because going first is way better than going second: for instance, if you’re picking players on a team. “Balanced alternation” (Alice, Bob, Bob, Alice, Bob, Alice, Alice, Bob) is superior. If children are arguing over something, try an auction! The book recommends chore auctions, because children might have different amounts of money, but it seems to me that “you can’t buy control of the remote control if you’re saving up money for a new bike” is in fact an important economics lesson of its own. Not sure what the best way to deal with older children having larger allowances is, though. If you credibly follow through on threats, it’ll be less likely that you’ll have to follow through on threats. Majority rule works best for voting if there are only two options; if there are more options, Random Dictator (in which a single person is randomly selected to make the decision) is best over time, because families are generally small enough that everyone will be able to take a turn to be dictator.
No-Drama Discipline: The Whole-Brain Way To Calm the Chaos and Nurture Your Child’s Developing Mind: The one phrase repeated throughout this book is “connect, then redirect.” Connecting with your child first calms them, improves your relationship, and might improve your child’s brain. To connect with your child, first get below their eye level, then touch them, give them a nod, or otherwise nonverbally communicate your empathy. Acknowledge their feelings verbally, then listen to what your child says, instead of lecturing or trying to convince her not to feel what she feels. Once you’ve listened, reflect back her emotions to her (“you seem really disappointed about not getting to go to the party”). Throughout the process, try to have an attitude of curiosity about why your child is behaving as they are. And don’t catastrophize about what your child’s misbehavior means for the rest of their life.
Wait until both you and your child are calm to redirect; your child is not in a place for learning, and you aren’t in a place for teaching, when either of you is overemotional. (I think they chose “redirect” because it rhymes, because honestly what they’re calling redirection doesn’t seem like redirection to me.) Redirection is inherently flexible: the important thing is not to stick to rules, but instead to ask yourself how best to teach the child what you want them to teach. It’s important to be consistent but not rigid: if the household policy is that homework is done before fun, but the child’s grandparents came over, maybe homework can wait for after dinner.
The skills you probably want to build through discipline are insight into oneself, empathy with others, and the ability to repair harms caused. Therefore, ask the child about his feelings to build insight and about other people’s feelings to build empathy. (It’s important to ask rather than lecturing. As you can no doubt remember from your own childhood, children zone out during lectures.) To build the ability to repair harms, ask the child what they think should happen afterward. You can also ask them for ideas about how to prevent problems in the future. Try neutrally describing situations: “you said you were prepared for the test, but you got a D, what happened?” Always accept your child’s emotions, even as you limit their behavior. Emphasize what you do want your children to do (“put on your shoes”) rather than what you don’t (“stop messing around!”). Whenever possible, say a yes with conditions rather than an outright no: “we can read a story tomorrow night”, not “no more stories.” Playfulness, silliness, and humor can defuse conflicts.
Loose Parts: Inspiring Play In Young Children: The premise of this book is that to encourage freeform play with kids, you should give them toys that can be used in a lot of different ways. This book then proceeds to have pictures of literally every such toy in existence. It is literally 90% picture. I don’t object to pictures per se, and some of the pictures are very prettily shot, but I am a very verbal person who gets bored easily by the umpteenth picture of pinecones.
A random sample of things photographed in the book, to give you an idea: bouncy balls; buckets; boxes; fabric; metal washers; rocks; pipe cleaners; seeds; pots and pans; bottlecaps; colored paper; necklaces.
The Wonder Weeks: The Wonder Weeks claims that whenever your infant is really fussy it is because they are learning a new skill. I have no idea if this is technically speaking “true”, but it certainly sounds hella useful for parents to believe. It is a huge pain in the ass when infants are fussy, but parents like their infants learning new skills, and you can reframe the situation by going “oh yes! She’ll probably be able to lift her head up/talk/walk/whatever soon!” Since infants are constantly learning things, it is a bit hard to prove this framing wrong.
Suggested activities for newborns: lots snuggling.
Suggested activities for week five: lots snuggling; have ‘conversations’ with your baby; show her things she finds interesting.
Suggested activities for week eight: let baby play with her hands and feet, possibly naked, possibly securely tying a ribbon to a hand or foot; chat with baby; bathe with baby; bring baby interesting objects; if the baby can lift her head up, gently pull her up so she’s sitting supported with you. Toys: anything that dangles overhead; anything that can be swiped at or touched; a mobile that moves or is musical; cuddly toys; a music box.
Suggested activities for week twelve: let your baby feel different fabrics; gently bounce the baby; sway baby side to side like a pendulum; slide the baby down your body; lift the baby up slowly above your head then lower her down, perhaps making airplane noises; pretend to nibble the baby; put the baby on your knee and bounce her. Toys: rattles; rocking chairs; dolls with realistic faces; bells; toys that make sounds; wobbly toys that bounce back when hit.
Suggested activities for week nineteen: narrate your life to the baby; look at brightly colored pictures together; sing songs; play peek-a-boo and one-little-piggy; show the baby a mirror; say “I’m going to [dramatic pause] pinch your [body part]” and then do so. Toys: crackly paper; mirror; photographs or pictures of other babies or objects or animals she recognizes by name; CD with children’s songs; toy vehicle with wheels that really turn; screw-top container with rice in it; household items such as a measuring cup or colander in the bath; activity center; ball with gripping notches and a bell inside; plastic or inflatable rattle.
Suggested activities for week 26: peek-a-boo and variations, hiding yourself or her; hide toys under a blanket or in the bathtub; look at picture books together; whisper to her; letting her drop things from her high chair; songs where you move the child as you sing; standing the baby on her head; letting her ‘fly’ around the room; supporting her as she sits or stands; swimming (only if supervised closely); going to a children’s farm together. Toys: a cupboard full of interesting things like empty toilet paper rolls, empty boxes, a pan, keys, and plastic plates; toy pianos; toy telephones; drums; squeaky toys; cuddly toys that make noise when turned upside down; toy cars with rotating wheels and openable doors; things to fill and empty out in the bath; CD with children’s songs; picture books; photo books; wooden blocks; balls; wooden spoons; boxes; empty egg cartons; wooden spoons; cups that nest or stack.
Suggested activities for week 37: taking baby outside; allowing him to press doorbells, flip light switches, etc.; let baby watch himself as you dress or undress him; name things; ask your baby to do things for you like handing you something; patty cake; let baby imitate what you’re doing; put baby in front of a mirror; chase; hide-and-seek (make sure the baby sees you disappear). Toys: things that open and close like doors and drawers; pans with lids; alarm clocks; magazines and newspapers to tear; plastic plates, cups, silverware; cushions and duvets to crawl on and over; boxes and buckets that are larger than he is; toy cars; posters with distinct pictures; picture books; baby pools; blocks, especially if large; sand, water, pebbles, and plastic tools; swings; dolls with realistic faces; things he can move (handles, knobs); things that move by themselves (shadows, branches); containers; balls of all sizes.
Suggested activities for week 46: pattycake; itsy bitsy spider; row row row your boat; let baby ‘help’ you do housework; let baby ‘groom’ himself; let baby feed himself with a spoon; let baby cooperate in dressing himself, and name the parts as you dress him; touch and name parts of your baby’s anatomy; point to and name things; put a toy under a cup and watch him look for it; wrap a plaything in crinkly paper and watch him unwrap it. Toys: toy cars; wooden trains with stations and bridges; drum (or pots and pans!) to beat on; dolls with toy bottles; books with animal pictures; balls of all sizes; giant plastic beads; mirrors; plastic figures of people or animals; primo blocks; bicycles, cars, or trucks he can sit on and move around himself; stuffed animals, especially if it makes music if you squeeze it; sandbox with bucket and spade.
Suggested activities for week 55: give the doll a bath; let the baby help unpack groceries, do dishes, or do other housework; hide an object that’s playing a sound and let the baby find it; put a toy under one cup, switch the locations of the cups, and let him find it. Toys: dolls with strollers and beds; farmhouse with farm animals and fences; tea set (unbreakable); wooden train with tracks; cars and garage; pots, pans, and wooden spoons; telephone; Primo blocks; bicycle, car, toy horse, or engine he can sit on; push-along wagon; rocking horse; stackable containers; rod with stackable rings; colored sponges; box with differently shaped blocks and holes; mop, hand broom, dustpan and brush; large sheets of paper and markers; books with animals or cars and tractors; musical instruments; CD with simple stories.
Suggested activities for week 64: various physical antics; playing outdoors; asking the child to point to objects or body parts; movement songs like Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes or If You’re Happy and You Know It; silliness; cartoons like Sesame Street; peek-a-boo; hide-and-seek; ‘helping’ cook, vacuum, or do the dishes, or pretending ot do so. Toys: jungle gym and slide; balls; books; sandbox; tea set; puzzles; plastic bottles; cleaning utensils; toy vacuums; toys on a string; Sesame Street; cartoons.
Suggested activities for week 75: silliness; play wrestling and other physical play; drawing; trying to stand on his head or balance on one foot; drawing; blowing bubbles; jumping; balancing on a short wall; tickling; playing outside; playing with other children; ball games; ghost games; twirling around until dizzy; feeding the dog; tag; hide-and-seek; reading stories. Toys: cars and garage; clay; children’s TV; children’s books; trinkets that belong together; toy airport; drawing on paper; sand and water; push car; plastic chair; ball; bicycle; stuffed animals, dolls, teddy bears; stickers; sandbox; digging in the yard; Sesame Street; music; slide; colored pencils; blowing bubbles; trains; swings; rocking horse; puzzles.
Do Chocolate Lovers Have Sweeter Babies?: The Surprising Science of Pregnancy: This cites a lot of psychological experiments that have that sort of “gee whiz” quality that makes me think they’ll fail to replicate. Many of the cited studies are on rats, and things that apply to rat babies have a remarkable tendency to not generalize to human babies. She also cites Satoshi Kanazawa, He Who Gives All Other Evolutionary Psychologists A Bad Name. So if you’re looking for a science-based pregnancy I’d recommend Debunking the Bump or Expecting Better and skipping this one.
Anyway, the actionable advice from this book is as follows:
- Don’t eat food that makes you feel nauseous in early pregnancy.
- The expectant father may get mood swings, nausea, fatigue, food cravings or aversions, or bloat; if so, rejoice, as this is a sign of attachment and emotional responsiveness to the baby. (Also, now he gets to suffer as much as you do.)
- Eat a generally healthy diet: leafy greens, eggs, fruit, fish, nuts, beans, whole grains, soy, and a little fat and dairy, but not to excess.
- In particular: Eat fish.
- Avoid consuming an excessive amount of vitamins.
- Gain between twenty-five and thirty-five pounds.
- Have sex.
- Tell the father the baby looks like him, even if it doesn’t.
- Read books to and play music to the baby in utero; they will find those books and music comforting when they leave.
- Moderate stress and exercise are good for the fetus, but high levels of stress and exercise are bad.
- Eat a chocolate bar each day.
- Squat during childbirth if you can.
- Stimulate your breasts to induce labor.
- Spend the first hour after birth with the baby pressed against your chest.
- Don’t bathe right after childbirth.
- Get ample support during childbirth.
- Take pictures of your baby’s smiling face and then look at it as often as possible.
- Give your baby ample love and nurturing, even to the point of spoiling her.
- Breast-feed.
- While breast-feeding, try to have moderate stress in your life.
No Regrets Parenting: Turning Long Days and Short Years Into Cherished Moments With Your Kids: No Regrets Parenting consists mostly of a series of ideas about how to spend time with your children if you are a busy person, as many parents are. For instance, you can host sleepovers; if you’re working weekends, you can take your kids to the office with you and let them play at the office. To bond with a teenager, you can teach them to drive and then help them apply to college. You can have family traditions, like a taco night and family movie night. You can have family dinners together every night. Most of the suggestions are not particularly groundbreaking, but it’s nice to have them all in one place.
Playful Parenting: An Exciting New Approach To Raising Children That Will Help You Nurture Close Connections, Solve Behavioral Problems, and Encourage Confidence: Based on the author’s experience as a father and play therapist, this is an extensive guide to playing with children. I find it extraordinarily reassuring that there are how-to books for these things.
Playful Parenting argues that children’s misbehavior is often caused by disconnection, and creating a sense of connection can cause them to behave better. The best way to do this is through the language of children– play. Play also allows children to work through their feelings and conflicts in their lives. We may stigmatize certain kinds of play– disapproving of roughhousing, violent play, or play we deem sexist. But these allow kids to feel a sense of connection and work through their feelings too: for instance, wrestling can allow kids to explore themes of aggression, anger, isolation, or strength. So try to respect your children’s play and engage in it wholeheartedly. For instance, the author played Barbies reluctantly with his daughter, thinking that they were boring and stupid and sexist, before he realized that this was basically saying to his daughter “your interests are boring and stupid and sexist.” He then played with more enthusiasm. The author suggests that wrestling and other physical play are excellent ways to engage with kids, as is pretending to be stupid (for instance, putting a sock on your head, then on your hand, then on your shoulder, before you put it on your foot). Play can stop misbehavior in its tracks by turning the misbehavior into a game.
[content warning: child sexual abuse]
Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex: A must-read for any sex-positive American. Levine’s thesis is that, as a culture, Americans are hysterical about the sexuality of minors, and this causes a great deal of harm. Although her book is nearly fifteen years old, the trends she discusses have not changed as far as I can tell.
For instance, consider child on child sexual abuse. Although child on child sexual abuse is a real thing (and one of my few critiques of Levine’s book is that I think she fails to engage with the harm it can cause), social workers and scholars have concluded without evidence that sexual play and ordinary roughhousing are really sexual abuse. Sexual play might not be “just curiosity”– many children experience sexual pleasure, which they may wish to consensually explore with other children. We simply do not have enough information to know what is normal and what is abnormal sexual play, as well as whether abnormal but consensual sexual play causes any harm. In the absence of this evidence, children are being branded as sexual offenders and placed in treatment that is far more appropriate to actual abusers (for instance, it characterizes the child’s insistence that they have not done anything wrong as “denial”).
Even if it’s not branded as child-on-child sexual abuse, Levine points out that our attitude towards children’s sexuality is fucked up in a lot of different ways. For instance, she describes a parenting advice columnist who, when asked what to do when the parent catches two five-year-old boys looking at and touching each other’s penises, says to tell them there’s nothing wrong with their bodies but that their bodies are private so they shouldn’t show them to each other. Levine asks, “surely, if we want to teach our children about privacy, the correct thing to do would be to say ‘excuse me’ and close the door?” There is simply no concept that children might have privacy from parents or the ability to make decisions about their own bodies.
The situation is worse for teenagers, who pretty much always want sex more than children do. Levine’s criticisms of abstinence-only education are familiar, but she goes farther than that. Levine questions the usefulness of statutory rape law, pointing out that the line is drawn differently in different places, and yet most Americans don’t even know whether their state is a sex-under-eighteen-is-illegal state or a sex-under-sixteen-is-illegal state. She points out that many adults who had sex with adults as teenagers consider it a positive experience, and essentially no one considers actual rape to be a positive experience. And getting the courts involved can worsen an already bad situation.
Levine argues that teenagers should generally be expected to engage in outercourse, rather than intercourse. However, even comprehensive sex education (Levine calls it “abstinence-plus”) provides little to no education about what outercourse might mean, almost never mentioning such activities as phone sex, sharing porn, frottage, or use of sex toys. Many people condemn cybersex, even though it’s objectively speaking the safest form of sex a teenager might engage in: there’s no STI or pregnancy risk, and real life doesn’t come with a block function. But cybersex combines the terrifying Teen Sexuality with the terrifying Internet, so it’s doomed.
Thing of Things 
For anyone wondering just how balanced alternation works in general, it’s just the Thue-Morse sequence.
It generalizes to 3 or more people as well; each “01” becomes a “012…n”, and each “10” becomes a “n…210” (truncated if necessary to fit the specified length).
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How does it compare with snake ordering (ABBAABBA), balance-wise?
Obviously snake ordering doesn’t generalize the same way, but is one generally better than the other? I could see arguments either way.
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To be clear, snake ordering is just ABBA repeated over and over?
(Not sure what you mean by it doesn’t generalize. It does generalize to more people and longer lengths?)
I haven’t bothered to look into the actual game-theoretic properties of either, but it’s sort of a generalization of that idea. Snake ordering says, OK, rather than AB over and over, we should alternate AB’s with BA’s, just as we alternate A’s with B’s. But let’s say we take that further — having done this once to get ABBA, next time around, shouldn’t we reverse the roles of A and B, to keep it balanced? So we get ABBABAAB. So we could just do that over and over… but next time around, shouldn’t we reverse the roles of A and B, to keep it balanced? So we get ABBABAABBAABABBA. Etc. This gets you the Thue-Morse sequence.
(Interestingly, the people who introduced the term “balanced alternation” don’t seem to have realized they were reinventing the Thue-Morse sequence.)
Anyway if you want to actually go read about its formal fairness properties I’d suggest just, like, checking the references in Wikipedia or something…
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People keep on reinventing (Prouhet-)Thue-Morse! (e.g. see this article on dividing coffee between two mugs).
I’m actually a bit surprised that Brams and Taylor didn’t acknowledge Thue-Morse when introducing the term “balanced alternation”; Alan Taylor is a math professor with a PhD in math and I would have expected him to know about the sequence.
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Sorry, yes, it is just ABBA repeated as long as necessary. It’s not obvious how to generalize to more players; you can do something like ABC/CBA/ABC… or ABC/CAB/BCA… or other things.
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The generalization was mentioned in the book, actually, but considered impractical due to the difficulty of explaining it to preschoolers.
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Fair points on childhood sexuality, but I’d be terrified of the possibility that one of the children is uncomfortable with the sexual contact.
Also, I guess I’m still waiting for a big detailed child autonomy FAQ, because every time I read generalizations about letting five year olds make decisions about their own bodies I imagine them putting their head in a bag or something.
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> We simply do not have enough information to know what is normal and what is abnormal sexual play, as well as whether abnormal but consensual sexual play causes any harm.
I think this subject isn’t a complete overlap with your subject. For example, two ten year olds could imitate a video they saw, and then it would turn out they’d been exposed to sex too early and were developing an unhealthy obsession. On the other hand, a nine year old could happen to have undeveloped capacity for consent, agree to kiss an enthusiastic ten year old incapable of noticing warning signs, and feel cajoled later.
There are lots of questions. I suppose I’d appreciate a master post too.
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Cybersex is one of the most dangerous forms of sex someone might engage in: real life doesn’t come with trivially-reproducible records. It’s even worse for teenagers, for obvious reasons relating to the law. (And high school social dynamics.)
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While I acknowledge the severe risks that you have raised, I would still say that it would be even more dangerous to have physical sex on a live video feed, for example.
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Not an issue if teenagers engage in anonymous/pseudonymous cybersex with strangers or Internet friends, which seems like the safest way to do it.
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Physically safer, but not necessarily emotionally. My SO felt like she was harmed by her online experiences; the lesson she learned was along the lines of “I have to act like those women in porn who want sex all the time, because it’s the only way I can get people to like me.” A fourteen year old girl in a sex chat room with adult men is not necessarily a safe thing to be.
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And in a pregnancy book, I think it is wildly inappropriate to talk about the process of birth and associated medical procedures as if they are so disgusting men cannot possibly be expected to deal with them. If you can’t handle knowing what an episiotomy is, maybe you shouldn’t have a partner who might get one.
This strikes me as unfair. I don’t have any exact numbers, but I would guess that there are a lot of people who find the idea of pregnancy and giving birth unnerving and/or disgusting, and far more who find the specifics unnerving/disgusting. An advice book that works with that is a thing that is useful. “Cannot possibly be expected to deal with” is probably too far, but “feels very uncomfortable dealing with, and would prefer not to” isn’t a ridiculous preference.
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Lots of women feel uncomfortable knowing what an episiotomy is. In fact, women probably feel *more* uncomfortable, because they generally have the body parts in question. Nevertheless, part of preparing for birth for pregnant people is learning about what’s going to happen to their body. Given that men are very likely going to be present at the birth, and are certainly going to have to take care of their partners if they have an episiotomy (as an eighth of women will), this seems like very important knowledge for them, and given that pregnant women can usually handle it, I think that men can too. If you are very squicked by birth, then the option of not conceiving a child is perfectly available to you, and I encourage men who are so squicked to take it.
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I mostly agree with everything you say here, I think I just disagree about what these statements imply.
I do agree that if I had a partner who had a very strong preference for me to be present at any births I would have a very strong preference for not conceiving any children with that partner. I don’t think that means I would be automatically barred from having children. Again lacking any actual data, it is possible I am underestimating the prevalence of that first preference.
My issue with the original paragraph was the idea that it was wrong of the book to talk as if its readers would find pregnancy gross. I think that women finding episiotomies gross supports the idea that engaging in talk of pregnancy with this grossness-reaction in mind is helpful. Looking back, a lot of this hinges on exactly how untouchably gross pregnancy was represented as being, which (having not read the book) I concede that I am not in the best position to judge.
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The authors refused to explain what an episiotomy was because it was so gross that men shouldn’t know about it (they suggested googling “if you really wanted to know”). This is absurd for a pregnancy-advice book to do about a procedure endured by an eighth of Americans who give birth.
It is generally expected that the pregnant person’s primary partner is their birth partner to provide them emotional support during the birth. If you plan on not being a birth partner, then I suggest you budget a thousand dollars or so for a doula to provide the emotional support you are not providing. I also suggest familiarizing yourself with the process of recovery from birth, although I suppose postpartum doulas also exist and it is theoretically possible to outsource the entire project of providing support for your partner as they go through one of the most physically harrowing experiences it is possible for a person to go through. Regardless, I suggest you screen heavily for a partner with the trait “does not want their partner to be present at an extremely physically difficult and emotionally meaningful experience”, as I believe this will be quite uncommon.
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Various sources (e.g. https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/unintendedpregnancy/) agree that about 50% of pregnancies are unplanned. This makes me feel like the option of not conceiving a child isn’t as perfectly available to men as you imply. Once a woman is pregnant the man has no more say in the matter than the woman is willing to grant him.
Setting the standard that you should not have children if you’re squicked out by the birthing process seems like a very high, and harsh, bar. I’ve had a lifelong phobia about bathroom issues (which I have tried to work on). When I was younger I would leave a party early, for example, rather than have a bowel movement in what to me felt like too public a place. Even talking about stomach problems etc. used to make me extremely uncomfortable. Changing diapers was extremely difficult for me, but I did it because my child needed it and on net the pros of having a kid outweighed the cons. It’s gotten better with practice, but I still have a physical reaction where my stomach knots up and it takes 15-20 minutes to settle itself every time I do it.
It’s very difficult for people to control their visceral reactions to things. Perhaps a better standard would be, talk about what squicks you out with your partner, and develop a plan that works for the two of you. If a woman is sufficiently off-put by a man being squicked out by birth, she certainly has the option of not conceiving a child with him.
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“It is generally expected that the pregnant person’s primary partner is their birth partner to provide them emotional support during the birth”
This is a fairly new phenomenon correct? My impression is that for most of history the men-folk mainly stayed in a separate area and waited for the women-folk to do the whole birth thing. I could be mistaken about that though.
Personally, I have a weak preference to be there when a partner gives birth. If she didn’t have a preference I would decide to be there because I do get something out of it personally. I’d certainly be there if my presence were something she valued. However, if she didn’t want me present for whatever reason, I’d be mostly fine with it (and I certainly wouldn’t screen out potential partners for having that preference).
If I’m correct about genders being separated during this process historically is there a reason for that? I’m looking for a steel-man reason, not a knee-jerk “because past societies were super sexist durrr!” type reason.
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In the late 1800s, twilight sleep was developed, which caused women to entirely forget the birth, but also caused loss of inhibitions and even psychosis during the birthing process. Men were excluded from the birthing room on the grounds that it would be somewhat disturbing to have your wife screaming and clawing, have to be put in a straightjacket, and then the next day smile and say “I don’t remember what happened.”
I do not know enough to know which other cultures excluded the father or why, although I would like to point out that since societies were patriarchal for thousands of years “birth was gross and men didn’t want to deal with it” is, in fact, a pretty plausible explanation.
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> it is theoretically possible to outsource the entire project of providing support for your partner as they go through one of the most physically harrowing experiences it is possible for a person to go through
> Regardless, I suggest you screen heavily for a partner with the trait “does not want their partner to be present at an extremely physically difficult and emotionally meaningful experience”
I’m kind of frustrated and I may be reacting more touchily than is warranted, but I still feel like you are representing not wanting to be present when a partner is giving birth to be unreasonable or contemptible.
I have a visceral “body-horror” type response to giving birth. I would prefer never having children over that. I would prefer never having sex over that. I would prefer, in a world without accessible abortion, suicide over that. Due to mirror neurons/empathy/whatever it is that makes me respond when other people have experiences, an (albeit significantly weaker) echo of this response is attached to being present when another person is giving birth. Honestly, it would probably be worse the more I care about the person, so I expect that if I were present when a partner was giving birth I would be actively worse than useless.
I suppose that actually this is not a particularly reasoned response. I have guesses as to where it comes from, but it was almost certainly not rationally derived from first principles or anything of the like. But it is a response I have, and there probably exist other people who have milder versions of the same response but whose partners are pregnant, and so, okay, yes they should probably be investing in doulas and maybe not reading the “here is specifically things that happen when giving birth” parts of pregnancy books. But the remainder of the pregnancy book could engage with that aversion in mind. It sounds like this is not what the book you are talking about actually did, but I do not think that speaking about pregnancy as if your audience finds giving birth very gross is wildly inappropriate as a general rule. Accusing it of being wildly inappropriate is unfair.
…This was long, pretty tangentially related, and not actually that big of a quibble. Given that your original statement actually referred to a reasonable objection, I’m not actually sure this was necessary. Consider it a clarification, I guess.
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@Ozy
I have my doubts whether everyone equates emotional support with a willingness and ability to get into the ‘dirty details.’ Disgust sensitivity differs between individuals and I think that some people have far stronger emotional feelings of disgust than others. If the writer of that book has strong disgust sensitivity herself and a tendency to choose men with a similar high level of disgust sensitivity, I can see why she came to her conclusion, although it is a typical mind fallacy.
Then again, you also seem to suffer from the typical mind fallacy in the other direction. IMHO, a truly inclusive book should deal with both possibilities and not declare that one extreme is right.
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@Aapje
I don’t know. Human reproduction is pretty gross, and there’s a wide spectrum between enjoying being up close and personal with it (‘here honey, let me do the cervix checks myself and let’s have placenta omelet for lunch!’) and not even wanting to understand what’s going on. Everyone’s heard those ‘pushing a watermelon out of your ladybits’ jokes, right? It’s not that big of a step to go from those to ‘sometimes, that doesn’t quite fit, and doctors may need to make some extra room by making a small incision known as an episiotomy.’ The useful info/disgusting detail ratio is pretty OK on that, much better than you’d get when you looked it up on Google or, god forbid, YouTube.
If someone’s not even up for that minimum level of detail, I don’t know what to say. It’s not just the 5 seconds of an episiotomy that are gross, after all. So is the first trimester, the third trimester, early labor, transition, late labor, recovery, breastfeeding, diaper changing, midnight blowouts or projectile vomiting after mini-you picks up a virus at daycare, etc. Adopting a 4-year-old or not having kids at all sounds like a safer bet.
The kinds of societies where fathers could isolate themselves from ALL of that are pretty rare nowadays. I’m currently pregnant, and I don’t have a village of experienced, loving, available women who I’d feel comfortable staring at my nethers. I’m fairly private and independent, but a lot of the emotional and practical supporting work (including ‘being in a room that apparently smells like someone’s gutting a deer to hold my hand’ and ‘helping me get into and out of the shower for the first week or so after’) will have to come down on my husband.
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Adding: so even if you and your partner agree that it’s not necessary to be at the birth itself, you still wouldn’t be able to avoid all grossness that comes up next OR all grossness that results from the bits that you DID get to skip. And I have no idea how you could, while still remaining involved enough to offer emotional support.
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@Mircea
It seems to me that for people with a decent level of anxiety, ‘just’ understanding all the risks at a fairly high level can cause significant distress, especially for people with a solid ability to fantasize. You probably shouldn’t tell people with a fear of flying about the risks that they are not already aware off, for example. For a lot of husbands, even the risks around getting to the hospital in time seem to be very anxiety inducing already. Piling more anxiety-inducing information on the husband may be counterproductive, if it causes him to lose sleep and prioritize the wrong things.
I’m also not entirely sure why a husband would need to know the details to provide emotional support for the average woman. The doctor surely will know better than him anyway, so it’s not like he is expected to take charge and save the day. If shit hits the ceiling, isn’t his best contribution to not get in the way of the medical personnel and offer platitudes, like: ‘It will be OK’?
Isn’t the doctor the person who will tell you about the procedure itself? I’m sure that (s)he is better at assessing the situation and telling you what you need to know than what your husband can learn to do.
PS. If a husband is aware of his tendency to obsess and be anxious, and for this reason doesn’t want to learn certain information, this doesn’t necessarily tell you much about how he will perform in a temporary high stress environment. Human stress responses are intended to make people rise to extreme short-term challenges, but are very destructive if the stress mode persists for a long time. People who know that they have a tendency to succumb to the latter can rationally choose to avoid getting into a medium-level stress state for a long period, but can perform very well when trust into a high-stress environment where it’s acceptable to have severe mental and physical degradation after the stress situation is over.
In other words, a husband may not want to be extremely sleep deprived for little gain by being quite stressed in the lead-up to the pregnancy, creating a risk that he won’t get the wife to the hospital in time; but he may be fine with being extremely groggy and incapable of much after a successful delivery. Such a husband may object to being told relatively minor details and yet may cope very well with the carnage in the delivery room. And a husband who does everything that you think he should do might completely break down when you need him. As you said, the safer bet is not to have kids 🙂
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@Aapje
Hmm, I don’t think that generalizing from people with either high anxiety or pretty severe tokophobia (as Hydro in this thread seems to be dealing with) is a good idea in general. I wouldn’t mind providing space for people dealing with that (by putting all the gross bits in a separate chapter or writing a book about getting pregnant as a tokophobic person (some do!) or wanting to be a dad as a tokophobic person), but I think that can be done nonjudgmentally while accepting they’re a minority. Writing all pregnancy books as if the reader is tokophobic is about as useful as writing interior design books as if the reader is claustrophobic.
I have a pretty graphic imagination myself! My husband does Krav Maga and I’ve banned him from providing gory play-by-plays about practicing getting your fingers covered in vitreous humor. That said, if I HAD to attend one of his exams, I’d want to know what to expect. (Probably less gory than my imagination tells me – no eyes are harmed in a general training session.)
I want my husband to know what might happen during birth. If not, I think I will end up being the person to be HIS emotional support, which TBH I’m not at all interested in at that moment. Neither am I interested in having extra people in the room who can emotionally support my husband while he emotionally supports me. I don’t expect him to be able to lecture me about the procedure (as if! I’ll be 10000% more prepared and knowledgeable than he is by that time, looking at how much of an effort we’re both making), but I do expect him to be fairly unflappable if people start doing weird-looking but completely standard things, without requiring me to explain.
In addition, most of your laboring time there’s just you and whoever your emotional support person is. Nurses only poke their heads in to see if you’re still breathing, the obstetrician only makes an appearance if shit hits the fan or it’s show time, and in the meantime you’re probably going to get increasingly loopy with pain and exhaustion. It helps to have someone remind you to sit up/lie down/walk around or to model the right breathing speeds, and to do that they have to know what these things are.
On top of that, there’s usually SOME conflict of interest between what the birthing person wants and what the hospital wants. It’s not always best to just do what the doctor orders, but you do have to have someone lucid there to decide when to fight and when to follow. People who are exhausted and in pain are very easy to coerce, even if there’s no particular reason why they shouldn’t get their way. To go back to the episiotomy thing: it’s apparently a trend for doctors to place episiotomies at the first sight of trouble, while evidence increasingly suggests that often, allowing tears to occur naturally has better results. To advocate for that, someone needs to know that episiotomies and tearing are possibilities.
Of course, I’m all for working with a person’s particular limitations. My husband, for instance, is dyslexic. I am reading all the books, he will probably watch a 30-min YouTube video. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence! If your partner is the type to obsess when burdened with too much knowledge and to shine in unexpected situations, they should be able to tell you ‘Remember that planned vacation to Rome when I couldn’t sleep for a month? And remember that time we had an unexpected four-day layover in Istanbul without our luggage and passports and with almost getting robbed at gunpoint and I made sure we had a great time? You know you can trust me to stay calm in scary situations even if I have no idea what’s going on.’ Still, I’d say that’s an accommodation for a very particular kind of personality. And that planning to crash for a week after a birth is probably not a great idea either. 😉
(I’d also say that in reverse, if your partner is the type who wants to watch at least 40 full recordings of a birth AND preferably attend one live before attempting reproduction as the non-birthing partner. You do you, but you know that’s just a LITTLE out of the ordinary, right?)
I think the most important thing is to figure out what’s needed (by both) and who can provide what (even if that means bringing in other people). If your partner is tokophobic, they should definitely get a completely guilt-free pass to NOT attend the birth. But that doesn’t mean that the birthing person no longer has needs, and the tokophobic person can, and probably should, spend a lot of effort to help figure out how to get those needs met! If only by giving you space to talk to other people, saving money to hire other people to talk to, and trying to find out how much the tokophobia is likely to affect them after birth, so you can plan for that as well. I really think reproduction should be a team effort, and just because you can’t do a certain thing doesn’t mean you couldn’t pull your weight in other ways.
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Do you actually get to make decisions during delivery? I was under the impression that at that point, doctors just tend to make decisions and do their thing, especially when there is time pressure.
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I agree that both partners need to establish some arrangement that works for both of them, although that may often require compromises. My point was more that Ozy (and you) seem to have a very specific image of what the husband should do, which is not necessarily the arrangement that works for other couples.
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At least in the US, people have to give informed consent to medical procedures.
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The entire delivery can take a couple of days from start to finish, and unless there’s a reason for a planned induction or c-section, it’s usually only in the last hour or so that any ‘you need to do this or someone dies’ situations occur.
(Even with the episiotomies, the choice is not ‘you need one or something terrible happens’, it’s ‘we can give you one and you’ll 100% need stitches, or we can wait and you might need no stitches all, might need around the same number of stitches or might need a gazillion stitches’ – it’s a risk management procedure that is currently coming under pretty heavy criticism as researchers think it’s overapplied and on average slows down healing.)
I don’t think that I have very specific opinions on what husbands should be doing – as long as what they do end up doing is considered useful and sufficient by all parties involved. (I definitely have a very specific opinion about what I think MY husband should be doing, but of course that’s based on a 16-year relationship.)
However, there’s definitely a tendency for even non-phobic humans to try to weasel out of gross things if they can get away with it, and the fact that pregnant people HAVE to prepare definitely sets the stage for inequality later. All too often ‘you’ve read a million books so I have some catching up to do on the applied side’ somehow gets translated into ‘you’re just so GOOD with babies, so intuitive and a natural, YOU get up at night and do the diaper changes and the soothing.’ Of course, if that’s the kind of division of labor y’all are going for, more power to you. But a lot of people plan to be (or have) an equal partner in caregiving, and end up with weird skill disparities anyway. Of course that often starts much earlier in life, with little girls being exposed to babies even if they’re not particularly interested, but pregnancy seems an excellent time to catch up.
Anyway, I seem unable to write concisely about this topic right now. I’m not arguing with anything you said, I just have thoughts. 😉
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My 3 cents:
1) If you personally have a problem with the details of birth, I think that’s an issue for you and your partner.
2) That said, a book which assumes that the majority of men will have problems with it is kind of offensive and doesn’t foster good values.
3) On the third hand, not having read the book, I can’t say whether I would think it was harmless humor or unfortunate sexism. Ozy is a good judge, so I’ll leave Ozy’s judgment as my base hypothesis pending further evidence.
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My husband has had a really, really hard time at all my births, even though they have all been shorter and less complicated than average. Part of it is that he’s empathetic (to the point that he says he’d FAR rather give birth himself than have to watch me do it) and part of it is that he never read any books on birth and so got himself panicked at perfectly normal things, e.g. me falling asleep between contractions, or the placenta taking awhile to come out. Sometimes I have thought I’d rather not have him in the room at all, but the one time I actually suggested it, he was offended. In our culture, for better or worse, it IS the father’s job to provide support. And given what the mother has to undergo, it kind of strikes me as the least he can do, even if all he does is stand there looking horrified. At the very least, it fills him with enough guilt and empathy that he charges through the postpartum doing ALL THE THINGS because he feels she’s done enough! Well, that’s what my husband does. 😉
Anyway, this is all a prologue to me saying that “protecting” men from knowing what an episiotomy is infantalizes them, assumes without knowing that they’ll be just dangerously squicked out, and (I think) would set them up to be more squicked out than they would be if the tone were more respectful of them and expected more. Kind of like kids cry harder when they’re hurt if they see that their parent is freaking out, telling a dad-to-be “this is so horrifying you won’t be able to handle it” sets him up to have that reaction.
And besides: odds are good the mother really, really does not want an episiotomy, and yet many doctors do them without asking first (which is illegal). If he’s going to be the birth partner, he can see the doctor reach for the scissors and say “put those down, she doesn’t want that.” When a doctor tried that move on me, I was lucky to spot the scissors myself and scream “NO!” at her.
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“household items such as a measuring cup or colander in the bath”- So long as you ain’t planning to use those things for their intended purpose. Because she *will* poop in the bath.
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