The first thing to do when you get baby home is to call your Early Childhood Centre, neighbourhood clinic or community centre, or whatever it’s called in your state. You should be given information about this by your GP or the hospital when your baby is born. Despite my Google-meister skills I’ve been unable to find comprehensive information about these centres.
The basic premise is that you attend a weekly talk-fest until baby turns 6 or 8 weeks old. The sessions are mainly to share stories about how hard it is to get baby to sleep, or breastfeeding war stories. On ‘graduation’ you’re encouraged to swap contact details with the other parents and form your own group. You’re then cast out into the world to fend for yourselves.
These groups are a life-saver for first time parents. My group of mummies (no daddies in our group - one mummy returned to full-time work almost straight away but her partner didn’t want to join us) meets twice a week – one is for a long walk around the park, and the other is at someone’s house, a picnic or a fun activity like painting. We’ve also arranged the occasional barbeque for daddies, or movie night out for the mummies. It’s a fantastic support network, and I don’t think I would have survived without it. At least, life would have been very different and I’d be a lot more paranoid about whether my baby’s behaviour is normal.
Do it.
Books and websites
- First book to read: Howard Chilton, Baby on Board
- Second book to read: Robin Barker, Babylove
- Parenting website: raisingchildren.net.au - In partnership between various child and parent-based organisations and the government, this website offers research-based material on more than 800 topics spanning child development, behaviour, health, nutrition and fitness, play and learning, connecting and communicating, school and education, entertainment and technology, sleep and safety. It covers children from newborns to teens.
