lack of time, lack of involvement

[Phoebe]

I think at least one time in their lives parents feel guilt related to their children. I feel bad when I am not spending quality time with my baby or if I left her in the swing too long one day. The list will only get longer as my baby gets older.



I feel bad for my husband and my daughter for not getting much time together. The only time they see each other is in the evenings when they are both tired. If I leave her with him she usually ends up in her bouncy seat or swing because he doesn't want to deal with her unhappiness. This worries me for two reasons. First, I will be starting a part-time job soon that will require me to work some evenings and weekends leaving my baby with my husband. Second and probably more meaningful is that my father was absent when I was born (he had been drafted to Vietnam). Because he wasn't there when I was an infant, he never really bonded with me and to this day I still don't have much of a relationship with him. I absolutely don't want this for my children.



My husband is a devoted father (and by the way is already trying to hit me up for a second kid Not!) and I attribute the limited involvement at this time to his demanding job. I have been sharing my fears with him while also encouraging him to play more with her instead of holding her on his lap while he watches TV. I am sure in time when she can interact with us more that their relationship will bloom.



Can any of your relate to this?



Jennifer

[houseelf]

Jennifer,



Guilt is reserved for good mothers!



Actually, it took my dh longer to bond with the baby than me. He loved the baby, but almost in a primitive, biological sense. Mothers have 9 months to bond with baby, often feed them from their own bodies, and generally seem to be more physiologically wired to be nurturers. Men definitely have a deep need to nurture too, but this aspect needs to be drawn out. (Sometimes new moms feel detached from their babies too!)



In my case, my dh has become increasingly more interactive with our son over time and now takes more personal responsibility for our child. (I'm not the only one who will attest to this fact. Both sets of our parents have noticed my dh's increasingly strong bond with our son.) Maybe this deeper relationship stems from the fact that now they have a history together and have attained a comfort level between them. Perhaps it can be attributed to the fact that our son is able to interact a lot more than a newborn baby. I honestly don't know. But for your purposes, please realize that this relationship will grow over time with persistence from your hubby and encouragement from you.



Good luck, I know that this can be a frustrating and isolating feeling.



Kelly

[Meenah]

I truly think, just as it takes Dads longer to get "into" the pregnany, it also takes them longer to adjust to babies. I think they don't realize there is a baby growing until they see your stomach "move", thay also don't realize that babies are people until they start to move on their own. Just my opinion!!!

Luanne

Jennifer,



Don't panic! With each of our children, Thomas really needed a whole year to bond....He just didn't know how to interact with small babies and felt overwhelmed by their needs...I worried quite a bit with our first...if I did have a few hours to go to the mall, I'd come home and Thomas would be watching soccer on the tube while Andrew rocked in his swing. It was hard for me to resist the urge to comment negatively about his lack of involvement, and for awhile, I believe that this pushed him even farther away...he felt criticized by me quite a bit...I had a certain idea of how I thought that he should interact.



Things changed for us when Andrew started crawling/walking....as he became more mobile and his personality had developed more, Thomas began to see him more as a person....and interacted with him regularly...



Thomas will tell you now that he hated leaving the kids during training and seeing them so little. We actually have had the kids on a really bad schedule in terms of bedtime for that reason. He didn't get to see them durin gthe dya, etc...and so we often let them stay up well into the night and share a family bed...sort of compensating, I think...something a lot of working parents fall into.



Give hubby time. When you are gone working, he'll take care of Avery his way...and it may not be the way that you would do it...but you'll have to let hubby do it his way..as hard as that may be...and when she gets a little older, I bet you'll see them interacting on a new level. After all, moms bond with their babies during pregnancy...for the dad it is all sort of abstract until the baby is born.....



Now Thomas spends his weekends off down in the playroom playing playmobile with the kids....playing hide and seek and "monster in the darkness" (don't ask! ) It will all come together...



Kris
Time is a Dressmaker, Specializing in Alterations!