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Home › Articles › Newborn and Infant Months › Home From the Hospital

Home From the Hospital

Now What?

By Belinda Clarke

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Many new parents ask themselves the same question upon being released from the hospital with their new baby: "What do we do now?" Leaving the security of a hospital staffed by professional caregivers is at first a scary experience. After all, having a nurse literally on call for questions – or simply to relieve you of your infant in order to get a little sleep – is convenient and comforting. Rest assured, however, you are not alone in your anxiety. In fact, most parents have feelings of fear stemming from their inexperience when it comes time to bring home a new baby.

Laura Moore of Austin, Texas, remembers a list of worries she and her husband had when they left the hospital for home. "We wondered if the house was clean enough, whether our feeding schedule would work, how we would determine who would get up when and what we would do if he got sick," she says.

 

Making the Adjustment
Dr. William Sears, author of The Baby Book: Everything you Need to Know About Your Baby from Birth to Age Two (Little, Brown and Co.), describes the opening weeks at home as a period of "nesting in." This is the time to learn to fit together as a family. During this time, he recommends several things to help new parents adjust in these early weeks, which may be physically and emotionally draining.

 

First, Dr. Sears cautions new mothers not to try to do too much too soon. He says that above all, what "does most mothers in" is not only attending to their newborn but trying to do other things at the same time. For the first four weeks at least, he advises new mothers to concentrate fully on their baby – and leave everything else to someone else. Dr. Sears also provides advice for mothers who may have a hard time involving their husbands in baby care. Pick out specific baby care tasks and articulate your needs to your husband, he suggests. Secondly, rather than getting what he describes as "teachy-preachy," he suggests new moms practice baby care basics – such as bathing, comforting and changing diapers – as a team.


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