Parenting books for gay dads

July 8, 2023 9:10 PM

We’re having a baby in September! We have read “what to expect in the first year,” and it’s fine—but it and almost every other reference book assumes the reader is the mother. I get why, but it also kind of sucks to read a book that assumes I don’t exist or acknowledge that the kid might not have a mom. Are there any parenting books that are not like this? When I’ve searched for books for gay parents, most of what I’ve found are about how to become a parent, not parenting itself.
posted by BuddhaInABucket to Health & Fitness (6 answers total)

Congratulations! Maybe Eric Rosswood's The Ultimate Guide for Gay Dads: Everything You Need to Know About LGBTQ Parenting But Are (Mostly) Afraid to Ask ?
posted by Iris Gambol at 9:23 PM on July 8, 2023

The Mayo Clinic Guide to Your Baby’s First Years is a little dry, but I’ve found it really helpful through my son’s first almost-two years of life. I don’t recall it ever being super specific about which parent it’s addressing- everything is written about “your baby”- and I just searched through my kindle version for “mother” and almost all of the uses of the word are about breastfeeding or delivery-specific stuff, or address mothers and fathers equally.
posted by MadamM at 9:29 PM on July 8, 2023

Dad here. IIRC, The Happiest Baby On The Block is pretty gender neutral, and its methods proved to be tremendously useful in my first year of parenting, despite the corny title.
posted by splitpeasoup at 9:54 PM on July 8, 2023

Congrats! Ours is due in August and neither my partner nor I are here for the gender binary so parenting books have been a slog. Two that I liked were The Informed Parent and Emily Oster's Expecting Better (Expecting Better isn't likely to be relevant to y'all but Cribsheet, the one written for birth and the first couple of years, is). I haven't come across ones from an LGBTQ perspective that I'd recommend but I hope Iris Gambol's rec or others work for you as well.
posted by librarylis at 10:06 PM on July 8, 2023

2nd Cribsheet - het parent here but that and Wonder Weeks were my favourite as a first time parent, largely because a lot of what I needed was “what even is a baby and what do they do?” developmental information, so a lot more baby-focused than parent focused.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 10:27 PM on July 8, 2023

I really enjoyed The Poo Bomb, and I'll give the advice that I most appreciated as an expectant father: Read a number of parenting books - if they all agree, you're pretty safe adopting that advice/information, if they are all different, do whatever you want/feels right to you.
posted by birdsquared at 12:06 AM on July 13, 2023