Nervous partner

[Starrsmummy]

Hi all,

After abit of advice, me and my dp have a 4 month old daughter. Dp is very good with her but he gets himself really worked up if I am going out or if I ask him to do something with her by himself, ie take her out by himself or do the whole bedtime routine. I try and reassure him that he is a great daddy and can do it but he is constantly needed assurance and for me to check he's doing it right. To be honest it's starting to get really exhausting. I've tried to talk to him about it but he doesn't seem to understand why I'm bringing it up.

He also gets quite upset when dd will settle on me straight away but not on him. She picks up on how nervous he is I think

Any advice on how to tackle this?

I go back to work in April and my job requires me to work away quite a few weekends of the year so it needs to be nipped in the bud by then x

Has he spent time just looking after your DD?

My DH is the nervous type but I didn't give him any choice about doing stuff on his own with our DS (now 9mths old); e.g. He's been taking DS swimming since he was 5wks old - I went the first couple of times but didn't change DS, I let him do that in the men's changing rooms and then just stopped going. He's been going for months now.

Re the settling for you not him; this is tough on them I think but very normal. You DD has hardly realised you're a different person yet. My DH bemoaned this too - I bf and just blamed it on the boob and then they don't take it so personally.

The turning point re settling for us came when DS was about 6mths and I went back to college twice a week in the evenings; DH and DS had no choice but to settle and be settled. Now DH settles DS to sleep every night and if DH is home during the day at nap time I will often call on him to come and settle DS for me - he's fab at it.

He will get less nervous with practice and being forced to be in charge and to do that you just need to make the decision to go and do something else for a couple of hours a the weekend.

Just leave him to it, don't give him instructions about taking her out, or anything else, just say, I'll be back at about X, look after DD, BYE! (obviously actually arrange to go out, don't just spring it on him, but equally don't plan his time with her.) And reassure him that he cannot do it wrong, even if he does things completely different to you, and you have to remember this too, he's not doing it wrong, just different. So don't give him the reassurance that he's doing it right, just say "is DD crying/covered in poo/running down the middle of the M25? No, then it's okay!"

Give him full independance, tell him he's an adult, and he's responsible when you're not there. His confidence will soon grow once he's both forced to do it independantly and develops his own techniques to settle/entertain/bath etc. rather than trying to copy yours. The same things are unlikely to work, even though I've spent lots of time alone with DD she still won't settle when annoyed for me in the same way as with DP.