14 Books for New Parents (Half Are Not About Babies)

Oster teaches economics and got tired of parenting advice delivered as commandments. So she went through the studies behind breastfeeding claims, sleep training, co-sleeping, daycare, screen time and potty training, and reported what holds up, what is weak, and where the honest answer is that nobody knows. The tone is the selling point. She is not telling you what to do, she is showing you the size of the effect so that you can decide and stop apologising. Chapters end with a short summary, which means you can read one decision at a time.

Lamott wrote this as it happened, in dated entries, while raising her son alone, broke, newly sober, and with her closest friend seriously ill. She records the parts most parenting books edit out: the resentment, the boredom, the moments of animal love, the two in the morning conviction that she has ruined her life. It is very funny, occasionally shocking, and never asks you to admire her. Because it is a diary, you can read one day and put it down, which is exactly what the first months allow.

Karp's idea is that human babies are born early relative to other mammals, so the first three months are a fourth trimester in which the baby wants womb conditions. From that he builds five techniques, swaddling, side or stomach holding while soothing, shushing, swinging and sucking, which you layer until the crying stops. The book is repetitive, and you will know the whole method by chapter four. That is fine. This is not literature, it is a manual you learn in one evening and use at midnight while someone else holds the baby.

O'Connell got pregnant sooner than planned and wrote the account she wanted and could not find: what the body does, what the hospital is like, what happens to a marriage in the first weeks, and the strange grief of losing the person you were. The birth chapter is graphic in a way that some readers will not want and others will find enormously steadying, because it matches what actually happened to them. She is very good on the loneliness of being at home all day with a creature who cannot talk to you.

Garbes went looking for what research actually says about placentas, breast milk, miscarriage and the postpartum body, and found both fascinating science and enormous gaps where nobody has bothered to study women properly. She interviews researchers and lactation consultants, and she writes about her own miscarriage and her own births without turning either into a lesson. It reads like a good long magazine piece rather than a manual, which means it works better in month three than in week one.

Organised month by month, with a long questions and answers section in each chapter, this is a lookup tool rather than a book you read. Rash, cough, refusing a bottle, not rolling over yet, strange sleep, strange poo: you find the month, you find the question, you get a sane paragraph. It has been revised many times since the first edition and is written for American parents, so the vaccination schedule and some product advice will not match your paediatrician's. Skim it once, then keep it where you can grab it.

Lewis wrote these dispatches while it was happening, across three children, and the honesty is the reason it survives. He is bad at the early weeks and says so. He notices that modern fathers are expected to behave like full partners while receiving roughly none of the biological or social scaffolding their own fathers were handed, and he is funny about the gap without using it as an excuse. Short pieces, each self contained, which is exactly right for a man doing the night shift on a sofa.

Galchen wrote short pieces, some a paragraph long, some a few pages, about the year after her daughter was born. She notices that babies are almost absent from the novels she loves, she thinks about orange as the colour of babyhood, she records the odd behaviour of strangers on the street. There is no argument and no advice. It is a writer's notebook that happens to be about the most disorienting year of her life, and it is the rare book you can read in fragments without losing anything.

Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson explain child development in pictures a tired adult can hold: the upstairs brain that reasons and the downstairs brain that reacts, and the idea that you connect first and correct afterwards. The advice is concrete, with cartoon strips and scripts for what to say. Almost none of it applies to a newborn, which is why it is here rather than higher, but it changes how you handle month eighteen, and the earlier you read it the less you have to unlearn later.

Cusk describes the first year with her daughter as a loss of self, and refuses to compensate the reader with warmth. She writes about the boredom, the resentment, the collapse of a working identity, and the sensation of being colonised by a small person. It is beautifully controlled prose and it caused a great deal of anger on publication, because a lot of people did not want this said out loud. Twenty years later it reads as plain description rather than provocation.

Druckerman raised children in France and worked out that French parents do a few things differently: they pause before responding to a night time cry, they expect children to eat what adults eat at fixed times with no snacking, and they treat the adult's life as still mattering. It is journalism rather than a manual, told through her own household, and it is honest that class and free public creches do a lot of the work she admires. The pause and the food chapters are the parts people actually use.

Ruttenberg had three children and found that every book about contemplative life assumed silence and free time, which parents do not have. So she rebuilt the idea: the repetition of feeding and cleaning as practice, anger as information, the small child as a teacher of attention. She draws on Jewish text and thought and also on Buddhist and Christian writers, and she is funny about the gap between the theory and a toddler at your ankles. Religious in framing and not preachy in tone.

Bertie is dispatched to a country house to sneer at a silver cow creamer, gets entangled with an engagement he does not want, a would be dictator in black shorts, a notebook full of insults, and a dog. Jeeves sorts it out. Nothing in this book matters, the sentences are the funniest in English comic writing, and the plot resets completely by the last page. Wodehouse chapters are short and self contained, which matters more than usual right now.

Oliver selected these herself from more than fifty years of work, and the subjects are consistent: animals, water, walking, death, and the discipline of noticing things. The poems are short and unpretentious, and almost none of them require you to have studied poetry. One poem takes ninety seconds. That is the whole argument for having this book next to the feeding chair, since it is the only genre that fits into the gaps of a day this broken up.