How to Love on the New Parents in Your Life
If you have anyone in your life that's recently, or expecting to have a new little babe in their life you may have read a list or two on ideas for supporting the new parents in your life. Having had my own little one less than a year ago I wanted to share some of the things that felt the most supportive and helpful to my husband and I as we welcomed our first son home.
Set up a meal train. Make receiving dinners easy, they won’t have to manage any logistics!
Send a thoughtful or encouraging text in the middle of the night. Those moments in the middle of the night, when you're exhausted and waking up to feed or change little babies, can be so difficult. Being the supportive and encouraging voice that mom and dad are doing great is sometimes all that's needed.
Give a gift certificate for a family photoshoot or newborn photos. This time is special, encourage your people to have it professionally documented so that when the sweet newborn phase is gone, they still have a legacy of those early days.
Ask how mom is. While she’s pregnant everyone is asking how she's doing, once that little babe is born everyone switches to asking how baby is. This can be hard emotionally for mama, make sure you’re checking in on her.
Give mom & dad a gift for some date time. A giftcard for dinner, movie tickets, drop off a game and pizza.
When they say it's hard, just listen. They may not be looking for help fixing the challenge, but need someone to share the experience with.
Schedule or Gift mom or dad time to themselves. Gift mom a massage or nail appointment, or ask her out to lunch. Gift dad a gift card to a local coffee shop or invite him out to watch a game.
In good weather, mow their lawn. In snowy, shovel the walk. Autumn or spring, do the fall/spring yard clean up.
After we had our son, we felt so blessed, loved and taken care of by the people in our life. Even though you might think it wouldn’t be traditionally “helpful” something as simple as sending text message to new parents really is a big deal. For us it helped us feel connected, grounded and like things were getting back to normal, even if our sleep schedule wasn’t. I hope you found a few new ideas and something that will lift up the new or growing families in your life!