A blog post by Adriana Bachmann
I want to tell you about a client of mine.
She started the Jaja Method and her baby was thriving. Eating well, gaining weight, sleeping through the night. Then she came across a different book, got curious, and decided to try a few things from another approach.
Within days, everything unraveled. The sleep was gone. The feedings became unpredictable. Her baby was fussy, uncomfortable, and showing signs of colic. Weeks of progress, reversed in days.
She came back. Her baby bounced back almost immediately.
I tell this story not to frighten you, and not to be smug. I tell it because it illustrates something that Chapter Eight of Bitches, I've Arrived is built around: some things in the first six months of a baby's life are genuinely non-negotiable. When you honor them, your baby thrives. When you abandon them — even briefly, even with good intentions — things fall apart faster than you'd believe.
Not Everything Presented as Essential Actually Is
Chapter Eight is the chapter where I push back on some of the advice parents receive that gets framed as urgent, mandatory, and non-negotiable — when it isn't.
There's a meaningful difference between what is truly essential for your baby's health and wellbeing, and what is routine, standardized, or simply assumed. That difference matters, and most parents are never given the information they'd need to understand it.
I'm not anti-medicine. I'm not anti-establishment. What I am is direct — and the truth is that some of what gets presented to parents as non-optional deserves more scrutiny than it typically gets. Vaccines are one area where I have specific, experience-based opinions that differ from what you'll hear in most pediatrician's offices. In Chapter Eight, I share those opinions plainly and explain my reasoning, so you can make informed decisions rather than just compliant ones.
The goal, as always, is a parent who understands what's happening and why — not one who simply nods and moves on.
A Little Discomfort Is Not the Enemy
Here's something that sounds harsh but is genuinely one of the most important things I can tell you: trying to protect your baby from every ounce of discomfort is not love. It's anxiety in disguise. And it doesn't serve your baby — not now, and not in the years to come.
Babies go through things that are uncomfortable. Teething. Adjustments. Transitions. Moments of fussiness that don't have a quick fix. The instinct to immediately eliminate every source of discomfort is deeply human, but it's also how parents inadvertently teach their babies that they cannot handle anything difficult.
Chapter Eight addresses this directly — including the specific area of baby care where parents most often reach for a quick chemical fix without reading the label, and where the simpler, older approach is both safer and more effective. Resilience is built, not given. It starts earlier than most people think.
The First Weeks at Home: Why Staying In Actually Matters
I know it sounds extreme. I know everyone wants to show off the baby, run the errands, and get back to some version of normal life. And eventually, you will. But there's a specific window in the earliest weeks where the most important thing you can do for your baby — and for yourself — is to stay home and build the foundation.
This isn't about germs. It's not overprotectiveness. It's about something far more practical that most parenting books don't explain clearly enough: the feeding and sleeping routine you build in those first weeks becomes the backbone of everything that follows. Disrupting it too early, before it's truly established, means starting over. And starting over with a newborn is significantly harder than just holding the line a little longer at the beginning.
Chapter Eight explains the specific timeframe I recommend, and more importantly, why — so that when someone pressures you to bring the baby to Sunday dinner at three weeks old, you have the understanding to hold your ground.
Safety Is Not Flexible
Some things simply don't have a gray area, and Chapter Eight names them clearly.
Safe sleep is one. Car seat safety is another. The specific choices that parents make around sleep position, sleep environment, and the setup of the space where their baby spends the majority of their time — these are not areas where you experiment or improvise or go with what feels intuitive. They are areas where the right information, followed consistently, makes a genuine difference.
SIDS and sudden unexpected infant death are topics I address directly in this chapter — not to create fear, but because the data on what has changed in recent years is something every new parent should know. I also share something that I've observed across thousands of babies over twenty-plus years that speaks to why the Jaja Method babies tend to fare differently. That observation isn't anecdote. It's pattern recognition built on two decades of experience.
You Cannot Pour from an Empty Cup
Chapter Eight ends with something that parenting books rarely say loudly enough: your wellbeing is not optional.
The best thing you can do for your baby in those early months is not grind yourself into the ground. It's not martyrdom. It's not doing everything alone and refusing help. A depleted, sleep-deprived, emotionally exhausted parent does not give their baby their best — and their baby knows it. Babies are extraordinarily attuned to the emotional state of the people caring for them.
Taking care of yourself — resting when you can, asking for help, tending to your relationship, maintaining some version of yourself outside of motherhood — is not indulgence. It is the foundation of the consistent, present, confident caregiving your baby needs.
The Jaja Method isn't just designed to help your baby thrive. It's designed to help you thrive alongside them. That's the whole point. A family that's sleeping, eating, and emotionally intact in those early months is a family that's winning — and it's entirely possible when the right foundations are in place.
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