When your newborn finally arrives, it’s such a magical and special moment. Your family has a new member! You want to shout it from the rooftops or these days, post it on social media. It’s time to have everybody come and visit and hold and give lots of love to your new bundle of joy, but first, there are some very important things you should know about having visitors see your new infant. In today’s blog, we’re going to give some best practices and tips for just this! Shout out in the comments with your own tips and experiences as well! We’d love to hear from you.
Have Visitors, But Spread Them Out
While it is super tempting to just invite a whole crowd of loving family members and friends to see your baby the moment he arrives home, we definitely caution against doing this! Their immune system just isn’t developed enough to handle exposure to so many people and if there are too many people coming by at once, it’s harder to evaluate if one of them is ill or becoming ill which could compromise the baby’s health. We recommend letting the grandparents see the child in the first few days and then have one or two visitors each day after that to avoid large gatherings.
Best Practices For Basic Hygiene And Disease Prevention For Visitors
While we expect our closest friends and family to have excellent hygiene, it’s not a great idea to just assume that their hands are clean at all times. Here are some things that you can do to help each visit with your baby is as safe as can be:
- Insist that visitors thoroughly wash their hands before touching baby and to re-wash if they want to handle baby again after passing baby off and going to do other things
- To this end, you may want to invest in some hospital strength hand soap. You will only need to get one bottle as they last a long time, but it could be worth it to ensure that your guests get the best possible sanitation for their hands. Mostly available on Amazon or your local medical supply store.
- Have visitors wear a face mask as they are holding the child
- In a post-covid world, it is just a good idea to have people mask up while they are in the direct vicinity of your newborn. If you want to have them wear a mask for the whole visit, that is even better!
- Ask your visitors if they have been sick recently, or been exposed to someone who has been, or if they feel they may be coming down with something. If they have, then let them know that you would prefer to wait a few days before seeing the baby. They will understand!
- For an extra precaution, you can get an instant-read thermometer and take your guests’ temperatures as they arrive to ensure that no one currently has a fever to help screen out potential disease exposure
- Have you guests avoid kissing or nuzzling the baby directly with their mouth or face. This can spread harmful germs!
- Ask your grandparents or other people who may be frequent visitors to get up to date on their vaccinations like flu, covid, RSV, tetanus, Tdap, and others
Before You Go
We hope you enjoyed learning about tips for allowing visitors around your newborn. If you would like to know more about this, our sleep programs or any of our excellent newborn care services, we are happy to help. Just contact us and we can go over your options and help you find the best path for your little one. We hope these tips have helped you along your journey. If you have any questions about helping your baby to sleep better, or about your baby in general, please reach out to us HERE. We are experts in all things baby and sleep and would love to help!
If you have questions about your child, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We would love to help. Please reach out to us here! We always look forward to hearing from you.
