How early should you start reading to your baby? You can start the same day they are born if you are so inclined. The psychologist in the NICU told us reading to our baby is one of the most important things we can do for her cognitive development. Newborns are taking in a lot of information so read to them and let your baby hear your voice and the variety of sounds that it produces. If you are running out of things to say to your baby (after all it is a one sided conversation for many months) and find your vocabulary is limited to few sentences repeated over and over you can just read books you enjoy outloud to your baby. It’s a win-win situation!
What to Expect: The First Year
Heidi Murkoff; Sharon Hazel
My wife and I read this book together while she was pregnant. There are a lot of myths and other misinformation that we pick up through life about being a parent and how to take care of our children. For example, I always thought you had to pat your baby on the back to make them burp after eating. Not so at all. Most of the time babies burp on their own, just make sure you are holding them upright should more than air come up with that burp! This book is a great starting point for knowing what to expect when you are a first time parent and how to just about any situation that you can think of during your first year as a parent.
The New Dad’s Survival Guide: What to Expect in the First Year and Beyond
Rob Kemp
The New Dad’s Survival Guide was one of the first books I picked up while getting ready for our daughter to arrive. If I were going to write about book about what you need to know as a first time, I wouldn’t, because Rob Kemp already wrote an excellent book to cover what you need to know. It’s about more than how to change diapers and burp your baby, but also covers things to like how to communicate with your partner and a heads up for some of the mistakes we make when trying to adjust to this new way of life.
The Gardener and The Carpenter
Alison Gopnik
What is your approach to parenting? Are you trying to shape your child into a specific person following strict guidelines or do you allow your child to come into the would and learn to flourish on their own? I think Dadding teaches me as much about myself as I can teach my daughter Parenting is a fairly new term. In the past thirty years, the concept of parenting and the multibillion dollar industry surrounding it have transformed child care into obsessive, controlling, and goal-oriented labor intended to create a particular kind of child and therefore a particular kind of adult. Gopnik shows that although caring for children is profoundly important, it is not a matter of shaping them to turn out a particular way. Children are messy and unpredictable, playful and imaginative, and very different both from their parents and from each other. The variability and flexibility of childhood lets them innovate, create, and survive in an unpredictable world.
The Consolations of Philosophy
Alain De Botton
I read this book to my daughter in the NICU. There was a local bookstore down the street from the hospital and this book was mentioned in an finance book I was reading at the time (Hagstrom). The book is an insightful look into how philosophy helps us to understand ourselves and the world around us. I read his book The Architecture of Happiness while I was in college and it completely changed the way I felt about what I could accomplish as an architect. Consolations changed the way I felt about what I could accomplish as a human being by changing my perspective.
Investing: The Last Liberal Art
Robert G. Hagstrom
In the year leading up to our daughter’s birth I was trying to learn as much as I could about personal finance and investing. I knew enough to know that the more money I invested the greater my annual income would become. I didn’t expect this book to be such a paradigm shift in the way I thought not just about investing, but innovation and insight. Hagstrom uses Charlie Munger’s ‘Latticework of Mental Models’ as a basis for understanding business models and how we can take the principles from one discipline and apply them to others. Depth of knowledge is great, but breadth of knowledge is where true innovation comes from.
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Winning at Dadding 