Not much to do

During these first few weeks there’s not much to do but hold your baby and watch its uncoordinated attempts and movement and facial expressions (better than any HBO show). But it’s not as though nothing is happening, though it will be months to years before your baby will learn anything fun or satisfying, the things that he/she’s learning right now is extremely important. Babies are programmed for facial recognition and breast feeding, don’t worry if your wife struggles with breast feeding, its very common. There are two main ways to handle difficulty breast feeding, see a specialist (no shame in it, very common), or get advice from everyone and wait till the baby is hungry enough to put enough effort into it.

As your baby watches your face and listens to your voice they’re learning about healthy emotional context. Yes, yelling/arguing around your baby will affect your baby, though a rare argument I doubt will have any identifiable effect you probably want to keep it to a minimum. Your baby is adapting its emotions to the environment it will be growing up in, keep that in mind, do you want a baby adapted for a world of argument and distress (it does have it’s uses) or love and kindness?

The other main thing your baby is learning in the first few months are the precursors to language. Your baby is learning the common language sounds and learning to listen and filter for the sound of your language. You want to talk to your baby often, clearly (NOT over annunciated), and without a lot of background noise.

Singing a variety of songs to your baby right now is good as well. I sang my baby the ABCs and number songs often hoping those words would be imprinted better/earlier. She could sing her ABCs at 8 months, but at 2 years she still can only recognize a few letters and hasn’t grasped the concept of letters making words, while she knows a significant number of shapes and colors. What the difference is between a “shape” and a shape we call a “letter” I can’t guess, but they seem to be different in her brain (which isn’t bad because we don’t really think of letters as shapes anyways). My point is, anything extra you try and teach your baby within the first year is unlikely to have a long term benefit. The best thing you can do is just spend time, smiling with good eye contact, talking and singing to your baby. (And usually when a baby gets hungry enough, even babies having a hard time with breast feeding will latch. It won’t hurt your baby to be hungry a few extra hours, and they do learn, but there are exceptions.)