It’s your first day at a new job. You got up early, made sure your designated work area was ready; that your laptop’s and your headphones’ batteries were full and that the chargers were nearby; that you had access to your new work email; that you were able to join calls on Zoom with your new credentials; and that the lighting looks good. You have some orientation videos to go through and meet your manager and team members calls.

But what does the first day of parenthood look like? It can be a lot of things but you can already imagine it will not be like the last onboarding process you went through in your good old corporate job.

The actual first day of parenthood can have many forms. There are so many variables that I cannot really describe in detail the first day in a way that will be relevant to you. For this, I recommend that you find a local professional (such as a doula) who can walk you through the process as it happens where you live and who can break down what available choices are there for you and your wife to decide.

My goal with this entry is to conceptualize more abstractly the responsibility of being a parent with the hope that it gives you a sense of what you need to do starting that very first day and that it serves as initial guidance until you feel more comfortable in your new role and you can determine it yourself. As I mentioned, there’s no manual, no set structure, and no onboarding process to becoming a parent, but hopefully, this helps you feel like at least you know in which direction to take your first step. 

According to my experience, parenthood is about setting your own limits. The idea of limits is one that my generation has heard a lot about. They talked to us about limits and boundaries as the means to a happy life through healthy relationships. So if you were born in the mid-90s like me you are probably familiar with the concepts.

I am unsure if there is a universally accepted differentiation between the concepts of limits and boundaries, but to me, boundaries are not dependent on a single person’s will. They develop in time, through social interactions, and people abide by them more because of our social nature as human beings than because it is something we necessarily want. Limits, on the other hand, are entirely dependent on a specific person’s will, and how they decide to prioritize their wants and needs in relation to other people’s wants and needs.

Keeping that differentiation in mind, being a parent, then, is knowing that it’s entirely up to you to prioritize what your baby wants and needs in relation to what other people want and need. Put simply, and complementing when I said it before, it’s about setting your own limits for the baby’s sake. The tricky part is that the baby cannot express her wants and needs. And here it’s when setting limits becomes fundamental and also challenging because it is you, as a parent, who has to interpret your baby and determine what her wants and needs are.

At a biological level, for lack of a better word, your baby, for quite a while, will have basically four physiological needs which are being fed, being cleaned, being comforted, and resting. Those needs are to some extent easily met because anyone could do it. You will get to know your baby up to the point where you will know when they need sleep instead of being fed, for example. But if a close relative, say an aunt of the baby, disagrees with you and insists that what the baby needs is being fed, then the worst that could happen, if you do not set a limit, is that you or your wife try to feed the baby and she just won’t eat.

But there’s a second level of need that a baby has, which is not as tangible as the biological one is. To illustrate it, imagine the hellish scenario where a baby is readily fed, cleaned, comforted, and put to rest by a different person each day. The basic needs are met, but the poor baby will feel completely alone, even if she’s with people all the time. It is for this level of a baby’s needs that parents and their limits are fundamental.

You need to provide for the baby to ensure that their basic needs are met, meaning meet the biological level of needs, but you also have to ensure that the baby is in an environment where they feel safe and can create healthy bonds of affection. You do so by building the structure that allows for that environment, meaning it is not something that you create directly or that you create with the baby, but rather around her. You indirectly create it by setting your own limits to external elements that, even with good intentions, might prevent that environment from forming.

There are a thousand different things that could come in the way. You might have, like us, a great support system that wants to do just that - support. And that support comes in the form of advice and recommendations on what to do, invitations by people who want to spend time with the baby, gifts of things to use with the baby, etc. Those are great, very useful things, but they need to come second to the environment the baby needs around her. External factors need to be dialed in a way that helps with creating that environment. And the only way I’ve found to do so is by setting limits.

When and what limits will be necessary? That is, of course, something for you to discover as you go along. Remember, it’s about prioritizing the needs and wants of the baby over other people’s. For example, your family might want you to come along with the baby on a family trip for the holidays. If you think or feel, though, that it would be too much stress for you and your wife, and in consequence for the baby, then you have to set your limit and let them know you are not going. It’s a simple example, but it will most likely not be far from what you will encounter in those first months.

To us, figuring out what limits were necessary was a trial-and-error approach, where we said yes or no to certain things which we then regretted or were thankful for having done so. And as time has gone by, we have become more adept at determining what will have a positive impact and what will not. A lot of that experience has come from finding ourselves in situations in which we would rather not have been in but that we didn’t know would be that way. It’s most likely impossible that a perfect ratio between limits set by the parents and stressful or uncomfortable situations avoided exists, so I think it’s safe to say there will be a lot of empirical learning.

An example of that trial-and-error approach in our case was figuring out up until what time of the day we could be out and about with our daughter. As you will probably notice quickly, not being home is generally very stimulating for a baby, as they get to see other people and places. This is of course necessary and healthy. As our pediatrician puts it: “She needs to go out and see the world!”. But it’s also very draining, up until the point where it made it hard for our daughter to fall asleep for the night. We initially thought it would be enough to make sure we were home for the last feeding of the day, which in our case those first months was at 9:00 p.m. After a while, we realized that being home for the second-to-last feeding (6:00 p.m.) was the sweet spot to make sure going to bed went smoothly, as our daughter had time to calm down and feel at ease after taking in all the stimuli of the day.

Now that a few months have gone by since the birth of our daughter, I look back and see how the dialing of those external factors has slowly but surely created the structure inside which is the environment that hopefully makes her feel safe and allows her to develop healthy bonds of affection. The structure has grown alongside our daughter, as we have found she has developed new needs and wants that translate into new limits. And, as you might imagine, it’s not perfect but it’s honest work.

As I see it, it’s your job, duty even, as a parent to create that structure. It will be faulty, it might even fail to protect your baby in an important way at a given time, but it will be yours. And that is what matters. In a few years, when your baby is an adult, they will look back to their childhood and think of you and your wife as the ones responsible for it, whether it was good, bad, or regular. No one else but you. Your son or daughter will of course have complaints and will have wanted you to handle something differently, but if you were there for them and you tried your best, the faults will never be worse than not rising to the challenge, as best as you could, of setting the limits you thought necessary at the time.

The challenge is to create a structure that is sufficiently sturdy to prevent external elements from coming in, but not too hermetic to avoid contact with the outside world. A structure sufficiently rigid so as not to bend under pressure from the outside but also sufficiently flexible that it adapts when that is more beneficial. A structure that also considers the temperament and wants of the baby as she starts to be able to voice them so it grows with her, and provides what she needs in each stage. I would like that eventually, when she is ready to get out of it, to become independent from it, that the structure my wife and I created by establishing the limits we thought necessary, works for her as a solid foundation for the rest of her life. 

When you think about it, a good structure inside which the environment for feeling safe and for healthy bonds of affection to develop, is one that allows the baby, when she grows up and is ready to move on, to overcome the structure’s shortcomings on her own. In other words, even if the structure you built was not perfect, if it was good enough to produce an adult with enough self-respect, self-esteem, and determination to fulfill her goals, you will most likely have done a sufficiently good job.

In the end, a parent just needs to show up and give his best, from the very beginning. Setting limits is how you can first start and then take it from there. As with many things in life, not rising to the challenge will be far worse than any possible mistake you might fear you can make. And before you know it, you’ll look back and see how far along the person who initially went through that non-existent onboarding process has already come and how comfortable you feel in your no-longer-so-new role.