One of the first things I did upon learning that my wife and I were having a baby was to find a few books to help us prepare for the journey ahead. Not so much how to raise the baby, as in how one might read about different techniques to help baby sleep through the night, but rather how to just make it through the next 40 or so weeks of pregnancy and be ready when the baby arrives. After all, my goal was to solve existing problems, not to hypothesize new problems that we may or may not confront when raising our child down the road. In that sense, this post may be less useful for families who are adopting and therefore aren't worried about pregnancy problems, unless the adoption has been decided before baby has been born and you're interested in following along with the normal development.
I ended up reading three books during my wife's pregnancy, for which I feel qualified to leave brief reviews.
The Succinct Week-by-Week Guide
If you're looking for a brief one or two page summary of what to expect on a weekly basis, specifically geared towards Dads, look no further than We're Pregnant: The First Time Dad's Pregnancy Handbook by Adrian Kulp. Each chapter not only covers baby's and mom's stats for the week, but also reminds you about upcoming OB appointments, discusses things to be preparing that week, and offers recommendations on how to make mom's job a little easier. It does a great job of complimenting most other pregnancy books in a succinct way while leaving out a lot of the "gory" details that mom is going through. It even continues a couple months into baby's life, for good measure. The Overabundance of (Sometimes Useful) Information
The "Classic" pregnancy book award goes to
What to Expect When You're Expecting by Heidi Murkoff. It's recommended by actual doctors (including our own), and is filled with tons of information about all sorts of things that you or your partner may be actually experiencing or wondering about, and probably quite a bit more that you're not. Unlike the first book, this is definitely geared towards pregnant woman, but I read it anyway and gave my wife the cliff notes. At 656 pages in print though, this is not light reading, so ultimately I can't recommend it unless you're comfortable with skimming to find the parts most relevant to your own situation, or searching in the index for something in particular. The upside is that no matter your situation, you will likely find some useful tidbits. The downside is that if you read too many tidbits from other people's situations, you may find yourself creating those new problems rather than solving existing ones, as I referenced in the introduction to this post.
The Data-Driven Highlights Approach
If you're looking for a data-driven book geared towards both expecting moms
and dads, the book to read is
Expecting better by Emily Oster. This is an extremely well-researched tome written by an economist, with the goal of giving you the facts to make your own adult decisions, based on what's best for you and your family. For example, rather than saying, "don't drink alcohol," Oster lays out observational data studies showing the relationship between the number of drinks per week (and even speed of drinking) during pregnancy with longitudinal follow-up of the resulting children. I really enjoyed this book because it didn't present pregnancy tips as black-and-white, and it covered the major topics from trying to conceive to birthing options in a relatively manageable 367 pages. Oster follows up this book with
Cribsheet for birth to preschool, and
The Family Firm for early school years, but I'll cover post-birth books in a later post.
Bonus: Introduction to Mindfulness
While we're on the subject of books, and keeping in line with the theme of this blog, if you'd like to learn more about mindfulness be sure to read
Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion by Sam Harris. I didn't actually read this while my wife was pregnant (I read it when my daughter was around a year and a half old). But if I had, I would have been better equipped to come to insights about my mind. These insights would have led to building skills for paying attention to the present moment with my daughter, clearly experiencing and accepting consciousness as it is rather than how I want it to be. And this, in turn, leading to repeatable and increasingly imperturbable joy and happiness, in spite of life's difficulties along the way.
