Until this summer. Dr. Florence Rosen felt like she was the oldest of all of her friends still waiting for a grandchild. One of her friends has been a grandparent for fifteen years.
During that decade and a half, she quietly thought to herself that she’d love to have an advice column called “Ask Bubbie,” where she’d answer questions for grandparents. As a recently retired pediatrician in Cherry Hill, New Jersey (just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia), she had been used to answering casual kid health questions from friends and family.
That all changed in late June when her oldest son Ben and wife Dalia welcomed their first child Trent in Los Angeles. Rosen flew across the country to meet the newest member of the family.
“They were discharged from the hospital and Trent was eight days old, and we decided to give him some tummy time,” Rosen told the Journal. “I was showing [Ben and Dalia] the best positioning for tummy time, and I put Trent on his mat to do it, and he literally just flipped over. Eight day-olds aren’t supposed to do that. So I was really shocked and put him there again. Dalia was filming it, just because it was Trent’s first time doing tummy time. Trent looked at me and flipped over again. I was so incredibly shocked that he did this. I was just truly flabbergasted. So Dalia decided to post this video. Well, that was when he was eight days old. He’s now six weeks old. So far there are 23 million views and climbing.”
Rosen’s TikTok account @ask.bubbie already has more than 80,000 followers and on Instagram (@askbubbie),more than 60,000. For Rosen, this is uncharted territory, as she had never used social media before. Thankfully, Trent’s mother Dalia is a digital marketing executive and his father Ben is a comedy writer — both quite adept with putting succinct sharable content on social media. Combine that with her 42 years of working in pediatrics, Rosen’s Ask Bubbie accounts are a potent source of information for new parents.
She was a board certified pediatrician and an associate clinical professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She earned both her undergraduate and medical degrees at Penn, and performed her residency at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) — consistently ranked as one of the best pediatric hospitals in the United States. When she gave birth to Ben in 1983, it was her last month of pediatric residency.
“The joke was I was having a well-baby elective,” Rosen said. “When I finished my residency, I had probably taken care of thousands of babies and kids. I was at CHOP, probably one of the top programs in the world, and I had great training. But I remember coming home with Benjamin as a newborn, walking into the nursery looking around the walls and thinking, ‘Now what?’ As I realized at that moment, I had never spent 24/7 taking care of a baby. I remember literally standing in the room with my eyes closed, wishing it was three weeks later, not because I wanted to wish away three weeks of his life, but because I wanted to know that I had managed to keep him alive, survive, and figure out what to do.”
And now with her TikTok account getting more popular by the day, Rosen gets to help new parents around the world ease into parenthood. Even with her meteoric popularity, Rosen is focused on establishing her credibility rather than making money off her new-found fame. Still, on the day of the interview, Rosen had her first encounter with a fan. A young couple with a young baby approached her at Costco and said, “you’re Ask Bubbie!” Rosen gladly took a photo with the family.
And though she’s known to her fans as Ask Bubbie, “Bubbie” is actually the name used for Trent’s maternal grandmother.
“She was very generous and gave me free reign to pick whatever name I wanted, but I would never ever put her in a position where she’d have her grandkids calling her different things,” Rosen said. Rosen hopes that she herself will be known as Grammy, but said that Trent will be the final decider over what anyone is called.
Rosen, along with Trent’s parents Dalia and Ben, keep a running list of topics to cover. And she will be returning to Los Angeles shortly to shoot more “Ask Bubbie” videos. At the moment, the most popular video is “how to burp your baby,” with 1.8 million views on TikTok. The second most popular, “Pediatrician Grandma on limiting your newborn’s exposure to illness” has 1.1 million views. Other topics include “Is Your Baby Safe With Pets?,” “Is It Possible to Spoil a Baby,?” “Why Tummy Time is Important” and “Protecting Your Newborn When You Have An Older Child At Home.”
The Journal asked Rosen for some quick hits of newborn parenting advice.
JEWISH JOURNAL: What have you noticed about new parents these days compared to decades ago?
Dr. Flo Rosen: One of the things that I commonly hear from grandparents is how rigid the newborn’s parents are about keeping them to a sleep schedule and a feeding schedule. The other thing is how so many new parents [in their 20s and 30s now] are using white noise at night, either for their kids or for themselves.
JJ: Prior to becoming Ask Bubbie, what were the most common questions that you would get from first time parents?
FR: How to keep a newborn safe from illness. I’m just horrified when I see an infant out at a restaurant or somewhere in a crowd, somewhere where there are lots and lots of potential exposures. It’s not like I think you need to keep a baby locked up forever, but if they’re under eight weeks and they get a fever, that opens a whole can of worms —you’re talking about hospitalization and antibiotics and it’s a really tough time. That’s a hard thing in a lot of families because everybody in the family wants to meet the baby. Everybody wants to come over. Some of them have young kids and they’re basically germ factories. It’s very hard when a parent wants to try to limit exposures and they get a lot of pushback from the family. That’s something that comes up repeatedly. I was always asked, ‘Is it safe to fly the baby out to visit the grandparents?’ Under two months? No.
JJ: What is something that even the best of new parents need to be reminded of?
FR: I think the real answer is that there’s so much that you can’t control as a parent, so it’s really important that you do control safety where you can. You don’t want to be neurotic, but obviously if there are things you can do, do them. For instance, a car seat. Back in the day, we didn’t have car seats. I remember my mother-in-law saying to me, ‘I can’t believe you’ve got all this equipment! When I brought (Rosen’s husband) Mark home from the hospital, I just held him in my lap — we didn’t have car seats!’ So I would hope you would never put a kid in a car without a car seat. Anybody that drives in a car and puts the kid in their lap as opposed to a car seat, that’s just a totally unacceptable risk to me. You just have to maximize safety where you can and exert control over the things that you can because there are so many things you cannot control. And that’s what makes child rearing so daunting.
