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Male Speaker: When a baby comes home it's a part of a family and a good way for avoiding depression, dysfunction in your family, is to cooperate everybody in the family that includes the parents, grandparents, father.
Steve Shelov: Being a parent and a grandparent now, the importance of having the whole family experience that newborn baby is really important for both the support for the mother and for that sense that that baby is not integral part of that family. Extra fun part of that coming home with a baby. It's also the important part of the mother to get the kind of support that she needs because her fatigue and her exertion is the thing to be avoided so she can have all the energy she needs to take care of the baby, to breastfeed the baby and to take care of all the new things that new babies require.
And fathers love it too and they need to be involved and they want to be involved. If the mother is breastfeeding, there are other feeding, around feeding things that the father can do. If there is bottle feeding, it's the way that the mother has decided to go with the newborn feeding, then the father can take some of those feedings, specially the late night feedings. So the mother can continue to regain her strength to be available to the baby.
Siblings are important too. Siblings look to that new born baby as a tremendous addition to the family. They are confused sometimes, they have lost their sense of being the child if there is just one other sibling. So it's important to include them and make them realize that there place in the family is just too strong, just as important and now they are actually a big brother or sister to this new baby.
Grandparents have a place to go also and they play an important role in supporting the nuclear family of this new baby. As a grandparent, I know that I was tremendously enthusiastic and excited about the new baby but had to be careful about intruding myself. So watching the signals between myself and my son and now my daughter who also has a new baby, and careful not to overextend but be there when they needed us. Let them dictate the amount of time and the circumstances where grandparents should be involved. That's the ticket to success of being a both a fun grandparent and I believe how to continue to maintain a strong relationship between the grandparent and their own children.
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