The New Dad Mindset: How to Keep Sanity and Perspective

Becoming a dad is great, but there are also challenges. Newborns enter our lives like wrecking balls, destroying all that is familiar, and it takes time to rebuild. While the work is ongoing, life can feel chaotic and uncertain. Having the right outlook is key. With a positive mindset and a bit of perspective, we can not only survive this difficult period, but thrive.

While I’m no expert—I’ve been at this fatherhood thing for just a couple of months—I am blessed with a great dad who taught me a ton through his example. I’ve also done way more reading about parenting than I care to admit. Below are a few tips and concepts thay helped me keep a healthy frame of mind.

Trust your instincts. There is a notion that being a mom is instinctive, while fatherhood is something we have to learn—often with a lot of difficulty. Popular culture churns image after image of inept dads struggling to look after the baby or handle basic household chores. 

Stereotypes aside, research shows that the role of the involved father is in fact deeply ingrained and essential to our species’s survival. The doting father is the product not of modern, western fancies but of thousands of years of evolutionary development. Fathers, like mothers, are biologically and neurologically wired to raise children.

During pregnancy, the expecting father’s testosterone will decrease, while his oxytocin—colloquially dubbed the “cuddle hormone”—rises. These changes prepare the man to be more sensitive and responsive to their child’s needs. They incentivize bonding by ensuring that dad gets neurochemical rewards for interacting with his child. During the same period, the father’s brain will literally rewire itself, sending energy and neural connectivity to areas responsible for empathy, affection, problem-solving, and other activities essential for parenting. 

Through these changes, nature ensures that the new father has all the tools necessary to fulfill his role. So trust your instincts. You know a lot more about parenting than you think.

Be patient. Cute as they are, newborns don’t do much except eat, sleep, cry, and soil diapers. This means that while newborns require a lot of work, they don’t contribute much to the parent-child relationship—at least not at first. New parents must run on reserves of love, duty, and dedication, not toothless grins and laughter.

These limitations limit early bonding opportunities, particularly for dads. Moms have the option of nursing, which in addition to feeding the baby floods mom with mood-boosting hormones that promote maternal attachment. But this activity is unavailable to fathers. While dads can—and should—support moms with breastfeeding, biology relegates us to a secondary role. We’re running Gatorade for the star player, not strapping on helmets to take the field. 

The good news is that newborns develop quickly, and each development creates new opportunities for dad to join the bonding game. Babies start smiling with intention a month or two in. Babbling and giggles follow. With each step, the baby gets better at engaging with its attentive father. The stoic poop machine becomes a mischievous little person, primed and ready to bond through peekaboo, tickle fights, and roughhousing. 

But get involved right away. That babies get more interesting over time does not mean dad should start the game on the bench. In my experience, the best way to grow into your paternal role is to spend as much time as possible with the baby from day one. 

Change diapers, hold the baby, rock it to sleep, and sing every lullaby you can think to Google. Find a baby chore that needs doing and make it your own—preferably something that involves lots of one-on-one time like bathing or baby massages. Challenge yourself to master the activity and perfect the necessary skills. If you’re a bath guy like me, practice scooping the baby out of the water and swaddling it in one continuous motion. It’s a lot harder than it looks.

Every minute you spend together will make you more comfortable with the baby, more familiar with its emerging personality, and more confident in your parenting abilities. If you take the opposite approach, keeping the baby at arm’s length, then distance from the baby will become your new normal—hardly a recipe for a solid dad-baby bond.

Don’t compare yourself to mom. Parents play different, but mutually supporting, roles in their baby’s development. To greatly oversimplify, mom (by which I mean the parent who assumes the mothering role) devotes much of her energy to nurturing and feeding. Dad (again, the parent who assumes the fathering role) protects, teaches, and plays. Mom’s role is critical from the outset: newborns love to eat. Dad becomes increasingly important as the baby develops the coordination and cognitive abilities necessary for playful fatherly engagement. 

Don’t get discouraged if the newborn initially sticks to your partner like a barnacle. Don’t think that you’re bad at fatherhood just because mom may be better at calming the baby. I remember holding an inconsolable P.B. some time around the two-week mark. He cried, clawed, and screamed. He cycled through shades of purple like a chameleon on a Jimi Hendrix album cover. Regan, of course, managed to calm the baby instantly, which didn’t help my self-esteem.

Remember, while you and your partner are in this together, you’re each on your own journey. You will each bond with the baby in your own way and at your own rate. Keep spending as much time as possible with the baby, and trust your instincts. Your time is just around the corner.

Don’t forget skin-to-skin. Experts recommend lots of skin-to-skin contact for breastfeeding mothers, but there’s no reason dads shouldn’t join the action. Take off your shirt, strip the baby to its diaper, and let him or her rest on your chest. There’s nothing like watching that tiny person rise and fall with your breath to drive home your importance as dad.

Be realistic. Fatherhood is an incredibly rewarding experience, and like anything worth doing it requires a lot of work. President Kennedy’s words on the moon landing could apply just as well to being a dad: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win . . . .” 

Tackling this sort of challenge requires clear thinking. If you start your parenting journey expecting your baby to be all toothless grins and giggles, you’re in for disappointment. This is why parents who expect the mere biological act of having a child to bring instant happiness are so often miserable. As blogger Matt Walsh observed in an insightful HuffPost write-up:

“My kids don’t make my happiness. That isn’t their job. My happiness isn’t a responsibility that falls on their tiny little shoulders. Kids come into this world helpless, naked and needing, yet so many of us immediately shove them into the Happiness Factory and bark commands. “Get on the assembly line and build me some happiness! Quick! Do your duty, sir!” This is precisely why many mommies and daddies are NOT very happy people. Many are lost, confused and disappointed. They are anything but happy because they were fooled into thinking that they didn’t conceive a human–they conceived a little happiness generator.

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And then maybe we should stop worrying so much about this happiness thing, anyway. I think the happiest people are the ones who spend the least amount of time whining about their desire to be made happy. They do a thing because it’s right, or because they have a duty to do it, or because it is interesting, or beautiful, or enlightening. They choose to find happiness amidst it all, but that was never the point. They aim beyond mere enjoyment, pleasure and satisfaction. If your own happiness is the Alpha and Omega of your life, you’ll never do anything important or become anything significant in this world. Ironically, you’ll also never be happy.”

This is not to say that happiness and parenting are incompatible. Far from it. But if we fixate on our own happiness, if we organize our lives around trying to be happy people, those efforts will get in the way of actually being satisfied. We’ll build fantasy worlds in our minds, then sink into bitterness and self-pity when reality sets us straight. As Walsh puts it, “[t]he problem . . . with parents who expect parenthood to ‘make them happy’ is that they are always disillusioned when reality hits, and then they resent their children for failing to fulfill their impossible expectations.” 

Don’t fall into this trap. Accept that this stage of life will be difficult. You’ll be dragged from bed at all hours. You’ll be scratched and soaked in bodily fluids. You’ll change diapers that make superfund sites look salubrious. Fatherhood will challenge you in a thousand ways. You’ll be stronger for overcoming those challenges—you may even find happiness in the mayhem—but only if you put in the work. We didn’t get to the moon by daydreaming about the view.

Acknowledging this reality will help you keep your sanity. Your mental preparation will bring resilience, helping you ride out the rockiest road without falling apart.

Be empathetic. Speaking of resilience, practicing empathy can do wonders to ease parenting stress. Crying babies can fray anyone’s nerves, especially at 3:30 am. In those moments when you’re feeling frustrated, try to put yourself in the baby’s position. For them, every sensation is new. The world pelts them with an endless barrage of sights, sounds, and smells. Their own bodies send pangs of hunger and exhaustion. Babies have no way to know what any of these things mean and no way to communicate their confusion except by crying.

“If we permit ourselves a moment of existential authenticity,” one philosopher-dad explained, “a chance to see our kids as they really are rather than what we wish them to be, it is clear that childhood is often terrifying.” Once we appreciate this, tolerance and understanding follow. We begin to feel for our newborns and forget our own preoccupations.

In addition to calming our own nerves, practicing empathy will support the baby’s long-term development. An empathetic bearing tunes us into the baby’s needs, leaving us better able to provide and connect. By modelling empathy through our conduct, we teach our children an essential skill for forming healthy relationships and navigating our complex social world. 

Don’t forget your relationship with mom. In the whirlwind of new parenthood, it can be easy to neglect your relationship with your partner. Stress can lead us to bicker and lose our patience more easily. Don’t forget that a happy partnership is not only key to your own happiness but important to the baby as well. One of the best things you can do for your baby is have a loving relationship with his or her mom.

When you feel yourself getting frustrated at your partner, try to empathize with her situation. Like you, she’s going through a challenging period and getting very little sleep. Make a habit of connecting with your partner every day—even if it’s just for a few moments. Greet her warmly when you come home from work, preferably before you lavish attention on the baby. Take walks together, and try to talk about something other than just baby chores.

Once the COVID-19 storm breaks, find a babysitter and have a date night. Or stay at home and cook dinner together, leaving your phones in the other room. And remember that romantic gestures come in all forms—big and small. No matter how thin you’re spread, you can make a few minutes to show your partner you’ve got her back.

Be kind to yourself. Parenting has a steep learning curve, and even the best parent will make many, many mistakes along the way. You’ll lapse into old habits of self-centered thinking. You’ll do things that are foolish, obtuse, or downright dangerous. You’ll miss teachable moments because you were wrapped up in your own mental world.

When this happens—and it will—don’t beat yourself up. If it helps, reflect on some of the good things you’ve done for the baby—times when you got fatherhood absolutely right. Once you’ve calmed down and created distance from the misstep, reflect on what went wrong, make the correction, and do better the next time around.

The good news is that it’s never too late to fix a mistake. Parenting has a repetitious quality, and in repetition is grace. You’ll face the same challenges over and over; the same battles will be waged again and again. This means that if you screw something up the first time around, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to make it right. Keep working. You’ve got this.

Written by Trevor