Researchers in Germany discovered several years ago that a child benefits from a playful father.

So playing with your child from an early age increases the long term attachment between parent and child.

I love playing with my children so this is good news for me.

Fathers playtime with their children was the predictor of long-term attachment, even surpassing the security that a mom provides for an infant or toddler. The fathers created that attachment by being sensitive, supporting, and gently challenging during playtime with their toddlers.

So the message here for all dads is to make regular, sensitive playtimes with your children as it is important for their development.

Rich Batten is a graduate from the National Center’s “Train the Trainer” Program.
He has these four suggestions for dads who play with their children:

Make time for play with your kids. It needs to be a real priority.
I agree with this one, no matter how busy your lifestyle is you should always take the time to play with your children.

Maintain a positive tone. Give your “disciplinarian dad” character a break.
In most families the father is the authority figure, it is the case in my home. My daughter tends to disobey her mother a lot but when I tell her to obey her mother she does so without hesitation.
When its playtime you must remove this authoritative figure and bring yourself down to their life and basically act like a kid yourself.

Talk as you play. Ask open-ended questions. Get your children involved in thinking and being creative.
I do this one a lot too, I think it is important to communicate with your child.
In my situation it is a little funny because I am from the U.K. and am living in Brazil, my daughter speaks mostly Portuguese but I insist on speaking to her in English as I want her to learn the two languages. The thing is though she keeps telling me I am speaking wrong and correcting me with the Portuguese words.

Follow their lead sometimes. The imagination of a child is a wondrous thing. Give a little encouragement, and then just watch and see what magic develops.
My daughter has a play tea set, it is so cute and funny because she always asks me to join her and of course I do. She makes me drink imaginary tea and eat imaginary cake. I find it so funny playing imaginary games with my daughter.

One game my daughter loves to play is chase. She is crazy for this, I have to chase her all around the house. Everyday she comes asking me lets play chase, its good for me too as its probably the only exercise I am getting at the moment.

Everybody who has children can relate to this.

The baby is born and whether its a girl or boy they always look so cute, family and friends come to visit and they always remark how beautiful he or she is and then they look at the parents.

O my god!
No longer is the mother sparkling with beauty with the life inside her, instead she has transformed into a mess of tiredness with black skin sagging under her half closed eyes. Her face droops and the glowing smile is now upside down and of course where theres tiredness theres irritability too.

The dad always gets more sleep but he himself too looks tired and all because of the arrival of an innocent angelic baby.

The biggest problem we faced was that when our new born son woke up for feeding, straight after he would get colic and cry a lot which would quite often wake our two year old daughter.
Then it would take an hour or two to get her back to sleep and by that time our son is just starting to wake back up again for food.

In the day our son Nicholas sleeps around three hours in the night he goes just two hours between feeds and this is because babies grow more in the night and so require more food.

My wife had a cesarean with our second child, Nicholas and so for the first few weeks she was not able to lift the baby so every time he woke we both had to get up, the only difference is in the day I had to work while she could take a nap in the afternoon but I cant complain because now she gets up with him and I get to keep on sleeping. I do get up and help occasionally but theres not a lot I can do anyway as he is on breast milk.

Baby Facts

New born babies don’t know the difference between day and night yet and their tiny stomachs don’t hold enough breast milk or formula to keep them satisfied for very long so they need to feed every few hours, no matter what time of day or night it is.

A newborn may sleep as much as 16 hours a day (or even more), often in stretches of 3 to 4 hours at a time and like the sleep all of us experience, babies have different phases of sleep: drowsiness, REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, light sleep, deep sleep, and very deep sleep. As babies grow, their periods of wakefulness increase.

As the baby grows these short 3 to 4 hour stretches will increase allowing you to sleep more.
At first, though, the need to feed will outweigh the need to sleep. Many pediatricians recommend that a parent not let a newborn sleep too long without feeding. In practical terms, that means offering a feeding to your baby every 3 to 4 hours or so, and possibly more often for smaller or premature babies. Breastfed infants may get hungry more frequently than bottle-fed babies and need to nurse every 2 hours in the first few weeks.

I can imagine many fathers or mothers can relate to this.

My son is just three weeks old now, in fact he was born exactly three weeks ago today, anyway he always decides to take a pee when I am changing his nappy and hardly ever when his mother changes him.

The moment he was being born he started peeing and sprayed urine all over the doctors. I managed to stay dry as I was by the mothers head but he’s been trying to spray me ever since.

I usually wait a minute or two to remove the old nappy, to see if he is going to do something and then when I think its safe, its a race to clean him, dry him then apply the new nappy and always he starts peeing before I get the new nappy on him. On some occasions he ruins the clean nappy and I have to put another one on him.

I know babies at this age have no sense of good or bad and right or wrong but I don’t know he seems to have an expression of awareness after he’s peed on me, like he’s found it funny. Who knows what he’s thinking?

If you have any similar experiences you wish to share to this add it in the comments box.