The First Two Weeks at Home as a Partner

Claim jobs, do not offer help

"Let me know if you need anything" moves the work of deciding back onto the person who has least capacity to decide. Take whole categories instead, and say which ones out loud so nobody has to ask.

Tommy's sets out the realistic list for partners: support with night feeds, spend time alone with the baby while your partner rests, pack the nappy bag before leaving the house, change and dispose of nappies, bath the baby, and bring the baby to your partner for feeds and wind them afterwards. Add the food, the laundry, the door and the phone, and you have a fortnight's job description.

Week one

Protect sleep as a resource

NICE's postnatal guideline names fatigue and sleep deprivation, alongside physical and emotional recovery from birth and the demands of parenthood, as things that can affect bonding and emotional attachment. Treat sleep as a clinical input rather than a luxury. In practice that means one of you is always off duty, even for ninety minutes, and the off-duty person is genuinely off duty rather than lightly supervising.

Take the visitors off her

You are the door. Decide together how many people per day and for how long, and then be the one who says it. This is a job partners are unusually well placed to do, because saying no to your own family is much easier than saying no to your partner's.

Learn the safer sleep rules properly, on day one

NICE expects parents to be given information about established guidance on safer sleeping, including bed sharing, and about maintaining a smoke-free environment for the baby. The Lullaby Trust publishes the underlying safer sleep guidance and runs a baby safety helpline on 0808 802 6869 for questions about it. Read it once, properly, rather than picking it up in fragments from relatives, because you will be the person doing several of the night settles.

Know who is coming and when

NICE requires a plan for feeding the baby before transfer from the maternity unit to community care, including observing at least one effective feed, and it sets out what should be checked before you go home. Write down the midwife visits, the health visitor contact, the newborn checks and the feeding plan, and keep them in one place. Nobody who has just given birth should also be the diary.

Week two

Take a whole feed or a whole night

Fragments do not restore anybody. One uninterrupted five-hour block is worth more than three broken hours plus "I'll take the next one". If your baby is bottle-fed or having expressed milk, you can take a feed outright. If your partner is breastfeeding, you can still take the settling, the changing, the winding and the resettling, which is most of the awake time.

Start the admin that has a deadline

Birth registration, adding the baby to insurance or medical cover, and any employer paperwork all have windows, and all are easier now than at six weeks. In the UK, GOV.UK sets out that paternity leave can be taken as two weeks together or as two separate one-week blocks, must end within 52 weeks of the birth, and that 28 days' notice is needed to change the start date. These are the rules for Great Britain and there are different rules in Northern Ireland; if you are elsewhere, check your own country's scheme rather than borrowing this one.

The same guidance sets out an entitlement people rarely use: unpaid leave to accompany a pregnant woman to two antenatal appointments, up to six and a half hours per appointment, available to the baby's father, the expectant mother's spouse or civil partner, a long-term partner, or an intended parent through surrogacy. If there is another pregnancy in future, that is worth remembering.

Decide what happens when your leave ends

Two weeks is short and it ends abruptly. Have the conversation in week two rather than the night before: who is home during the day, what the plan is for the first solo day, and whether any annual leave, shared parental leave or flexible hours can be moved to cover the third and fourth weeks, which are frequently harder than the first two.

What to say and not say

Tommy's advice on your role as a parent is worth borrowing in tone. Do not try to fix descriptions of pain or exhaustion; believe them first. Do not offer optimism about symptoms, because reassurance from you can cost your partner the phone call they needed to make. And do not narrate your own tiredness as a competition.

NICE asks clinicians to encourage parents to value the time they spend with the baby as a way of promoting emotional attachment, including face-to-face interaction, skin-to-skin contact and responding to the baby's cues, and recognises that some parents need additional support with bonding. If you feel nothing much yet, that is common and it is not a character finding.

Do not disappear into usefulness

It is possible to spend a fortnight doing every job perfectly and never once hold the baby while awake. Tommy's lists having lots of cuddles and skin-to-skin, taking the lead on a specific task such as bathing, and talking and singing to your baby, precisely because partners who only ever do logistics feel like staff by week three.

The NHS also maintains a list of services and support for parents covering practical, financial and emotional help. Look at it in week two, when you are tired enough to know what you are missing, rather than in month three when the crisis has already happened.