During the first few months of our baby, we were very active socially. As I have mentioned before, our daughter is the first grandchild of both my parents and my in-laws; we have very big extended families that want to spend time with her, and we were also the first of our friends to have a baby. In short, we had lots of people close to us that we wanted to see and that wanted to spend time with us and our baby.

As time passed, our family and friends met the baby, so things quieted down. We also learned to plan our rest better after a couple of weekends of overstretching ourselves and paying for it during the work week. We are now, when our baby is about to turn eight months old, considerably less socially active than when she was a newborn. If that sounds crazy, or at least counterintuitive, it’s because it is.

Those first months of parenthood were a true rite of passage. We did not understand well what our new responsibilities entailed and what our new limits were considering those new responsibilities. Saying no to people is not always easy, but during those first months, it was almost impossible for us because we did not even know where to draw the line. Being as socially active as we were during that time was part of figuring out our new roles as parents.

Both because we are no longer the novelty for our friends and family and because we have grown into our roles, we have spent more time in our home, just the three of us. At first, especially a few months after restarting work, we rested. It was much-needed rest, as landing into a routine after having a baby is, of course, always going to be tiring. But an unexpected benefit became evident as we recuperated ourselves from the accumulated tiredness. We suddenly had the opportunity to get to know our baby!

Seems obvious, right? You need to spend time with your baby to get to know her. Again, the rite of passage and all, it is not obvious when you are going through it. We went from spending every single minute of every waking hour with our baby when we were not working to only spending a maximum of two to three hours a day with her when we returned to work. Of course, that transition of going back to work was hard, and we felt sad, but we never realized it could take a toll on knowing our baby.

That is, in essence, the lesson we learned. It’s important to spend time alone with your baby. As the Italian saying goes - dolce far niente, but baby edition. Of course, taking care of a baby is most definitely not doing nothing. But being fully present in the moment and having no distractions while you are doing it is comparable to that happy, unstressed feeling of having nothing and no one waiting on you for something.

And why is it so special and important to spend continuous time alone with your baby? Again, it might seem like a dumb question, but it is not necessarily evident for a new parent. At least it was not obvious to me or my wife.

The first reason, as I mentioned above, is that spending time with your baby is what allows you to get to know her. At the baby stage, they change by the minute, so if you do not spend time with them regularly, you suddenly hold a completely different person in your arms. What does not knowing your baby look like, you might ask? In the case of our daughter, she did not want to be held in a way that was very soothing for her before, for example. Or she no longer enjoyed being in the stroller on our terrace, which she used to love before. These things might seem trivial, but communicating with a baby is hard. They cannot explain things to you, so it is disconcerting and even sometimes unsettling for you as a parent when you are not able to tend to your daughter’s needs to a point where she feels at ease.

The second reason is related to the first one. You will miss their growth if you do not regularly spend time alone with your baby. They change so quickly because they grow so quickly, and if you are not there to see it, you will miss it. No words describe how exciting it is to see your baby reach out to something and get it or start moving around, even if it is just a little. It might seem simple, but when you have seen them from their very first day in this world when they reach out to something, it feels like they are about to graduate college.

We also realized as time has passed that it is not only important to have time alone with our daughter but that it be quality time. What I mean by this is that time alone with your baby is not only about not being with other people but also about being fully present. When you think about it this way, it is really not only about whether it is only you, your wife, and your baby alone in your house. A grandmother or an aunt could stop by and the four of you could have the quality time alone I am referring to. 

What is important to get that quality time alone is that you are fully present, without any distractions or anything else calling for your attention, and that the baby is at the center of it all. By this, I mean that the baby is just there, lying down, sitting, doing whatever it is she is able to do at her age, with a couple of toys, and you are around her, letting her be. It is then, when they are just there without any stimuli and with you paying your full attention to them that you really bond.

Someone might say that spending time alone with your baby is not absolutely necessary to be present and get to know them or enjoy their growth process. And to an extent, I agree with that. There are lots of ways of spending time with a baby. I do recommend keeping in mind, though, that when you go out, it is not only the actual time you spend wherever you go out but all that you need to do before. Getting dressed, getting the baby dressed, going out to buy what we told the host we would bring, getting everything into the car, actually getting there, unloading everything once you are back home. It all takes time, and it adds up. When you realize it, the two hours you spent, let’s say, at your friend’s house ended up being double or more when you account for everything you had to do to be ready.

As with other things, the sensible thing to do is balance everything. The baby needs to get out of the house, and they most definitely need to see and interact with other people, especially when those people are family and friends who want to spend time with her. In our case, at the beginning, we erred on the side of going out excessively. When that stopped, we realized what we were missing out on. The time alone, just us parents and our baby, and the chance to bond.