Almost every new parent is nervous the first time. The good news: newborns need bathing far less often than people assume, and the routine gets easy fast.
Two or three baths a week is plenty for most newborns — more can dry their skin. Sponge baths until the umbilical stump falls off, then short tub baths in a few inches of warm water.
Set everything out before you start: towel, clean clothes, diaper, and anything else within arm's reach. You never leave a baby in water, not for a second, not for the phone.
Tammy Gold, LCSW, spent years matching families with nannies before writing Secrets of the Nanny Whisperer (Penguin). Today she works beside families, and their agencies, as a neutral expert: defining the job, interviewing candidates, checking references and setting up the first 30 days.
Bath time is one of the first predictable rituals a baby learns, and a strong anchor for the evening wind-down. Same time, same order, same calm voice — it starts signalling that sleep is coming long before your baby understands a word of it.
Tammy filmed this segment as the on-camera parenting expert for Howcast's newborn care series.
Watch on Howcast →The complete therapist-built system for the first year: feeding and sleep frameworks, soothing scripts, daily rhythm builders, caregiver handoff sheets, and the milestone tracking that tells you what’s normal and what isn’t.
Get the system →Every child's behavior has a reason, and the reason is different for every child. A Care Map call maps your child across all four domains — biological, emotional, social, environmental — so you stop guessing which advice applies to yours.
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You leave with your Care Map: what to do, in what order.
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