Inside: Use these 12 gentle parenting strategies to help siblings adjust to a new baby with kindness and with less resentment and frustration.
When I was pregnant with my second child everyone starting warning me, it’s triple the work so good luck… And they always said it with a hint of I know something you don’t in their tone.
And I couldn’t figure it out.
Two kids, twice the work… How could it possibly be more work than that?
I was seriously baffled.
Until my second child was born and a light bulb went off.
I finally got it.
You have to parent your first child, and of course parent your second child.
But now you also have to parent your children’s relationship with each other.
You have to help your kids learn how to take turns and share a living space and to not rage with jealousy when you’re helping their sibling.
You have to parent the sibling relationship to ensure they’re being kind to one another, and want to be together, and can be left alone in a room without hurting each other.
Creating and maintaining positive sibling relationships between your kids takes a lot of work.
And parents can get a head start by building and laying the groundwork for this positive sibling interaction before your child’s new sibling is even born.
Why are Positive Sibling Relationships Important?
Positive sibling relationships are indicative of the overall mental health of your family. If the kids are constantly bickering, teasing, and fighting, your home will be more chaotic and full of strife.
On the flip side, if you encourage and then expect siblings to treat each other with respect and kindness, your home will be a more peaceful place to live.
Which will make you a calmer, happier parent.
Siblings are our kids’ first friends. For better or worse, they will share a childhood with each other and have something in common none of their friends will ever understand: being in our family. Siblings will vacation together and play together and share all of their holidays and traditions with one another.
It will all be more enjoyable if they like being together.
Siblings help us learn social skills and social cues. They learn how to turn take, and wait patiently. They learn how to not hurt people’s feelings and how to apologize. They learn they can’t take things that don’t belong to them without consequences.
Siblings who have positive relationships with one another will stand up for each other outside of your home. The school playground is not always the kindest of places. Knowing someone will protect you, stand up for you, or help you is extremely comforting.
When Should You Start Encouraging a Positive Sibling Relationship?
It is never too early or too late to start creating a more positive sibling relationship. If you have older children, these 18 ideas will help you prevent sibling rivalry while maintaining positive relationships between your kids.
If you have a newborn or are pregnant with your second or third child, these ideas will get you started on the right foot.
How to Help Siblings Adjust to a New Baby and Create a Positive Sibling Relationship Between your Baby and Older Child:
1.Use very specific pronouns when talking about the baby
To help my eldest daughter take ownership of our newest family member, when I found out I was pregnant I started calling him “her baby,” and “our baby,” and “your baby,” rather than “my baby.”
This simple switch was more inclusive and helped her with adjusting to the idea of a new baby coming into our house and how much she was a part of that.
2. Help your older child first
As a new mom, one of my worries was, if both of my kids are crying and need me, who do I help first?
Barring any real emergency, my knee jerk reaction was to help the baby…help the most fragile, most in need of my help made sense to me.
But my eldest daughter was watching me. She saw I “chose” to help her sibling first, which of course felt “unfair” in her toddler mind.
So I started helping the oldest child first.
When both kids were crying, I hugged my eldest, reassured her and loved on her first. The baby didn’t know that I “chose” his sister and everyone got the love and help they needed.
3. Let them be annoyed or frustrated with the baby
All of a sudden, our kids have to share us. They have to share our time, our energy, and our love. They have to share their home and their toys and our undivided attention.
They have to be quiet because the baby is sleeping or protect their toys from being messed up or can’t go somewhere fun because the baby has to take a nap.
It’s hard for a toddler or preschooler or even a school-aged kid to wrap their brain around that.
Let them tell you their feelings of jealousy, frustration, or anger without dismissing it. It’s okay if they’re having those emotions and it’s better they share them with you than bottle them up or act on their big emotions.
Empathize with them rather than brushing off their feelings: “I know. The baby needs me a lot and I can’t read to you as often as I used to. That must be frustrating. Can we read together right now?”
Or, “You can be mad that she knocked over your block tower but you can’t be mean. Let’s rebuild it somewhere the baby can’t touch it. Do you want me to help you rebuild it?”
Or, “I see you’re acting really frustrated that I have to hold the baby right now and can’t play with you. I hear you. It is frustrating and it’s hard to wait. But I’m looking forward to playing with you in a few minutes. Thank you for waiting for me.”
All emotions are important and feel big to kids who are experiencing them and don’t have the understanding yet of how to manage them.
Big emotions are to be encouraged and accepted when kids ALSO remember they can be mad without being mean.
4. Set aside meaningful time with them using their Love Languages.
Because our time and energy is now divided between two or more children, our kids can easily feel unwanted, unloved, or unnoticed. Even if that’s not the reality, that’s their reality.
In our family, one way to combat that is to set up special Mommy and me time with my kids.
We go on dates, or run an errand just the two of us, or we snuggle and read books without any interruptions. It makes our kids feel special and extra loved and it’s a solid reminder that they don’t have to compete for our attention and our affection.
Figure out your kids’ love language here.
5. Read new baby and sibling books with positive messages.
We’re a family of readers, so it was only natural to get new baby books for our kids when we added a new family member.
We could read about what babies like and don’t like and what they would be able to do when they first come home.
My kids were hoping to play with their new baby right away so we had to manage those expectations. Books are a great way to do it.
Our family favorites are:
Mercer Mayer’s The New Baby
What Sisters Do Best /What Brothers Do Best
Todd Parr’s The Sister Book/The Brother Book
6. Enroll Your Child in a Big Sibling Class
Our daughter was so young when my son was born that she didn’t remember any of it. When my third was on her way, we enrolled our eldest daughter in a big sibling class at our hospital.
She got to dress and diaper a baby doll and learn how to help me when the baby comes.
She was so proud of that certificate that she passed and was ready to be a big sister again!
7. When your kids first meet, avoid holding the baby
I had read long ago that after you deliver your baby and your eldest child or children come in the room to see you and meet their sibling, it’s important that I wasn’t holding the baby when they walked in.
Keeping the baby in the bassinet when my daughter walked in helped me hug her tight with both my arms to reassure her that she could still fit in my arms.
There was room for her still.
And while many things would change, her getting snuggles from me wouldn’t.
8. Purchase Sibling Gifts
There were tons of new presents for the baby over the course of getting ready to have another newborn in the house. Between me preparing and the shower gift, my toddler kept seeing stacks and stacks of presents that weren’t for her.
So we made sure to buy her a present we knew she would love and we told her it was from her new baby brother. Her eyes got real big as she tried to figure out how he was able to go shopping for her new book.
We also purchased a few keep-you-busy presents that we would pull out whenever I was breastfeeding the baby.
She got to enjoy something special and looked forward to me feeding her brother as opposed to her demanding my attention to her when I couldn’t give it.
I would often read her books while I breastfed which helped squash jealousy issues.
And in December, one of our favorite traditions is Sibling Gifts. Here’s how we focus on giving to siblings rather than getting.
9. Read Helpful Parenting Books
Siblings Without Rivalry is hands-down one of the most helpful books on how to help your children create positive relationships.
It helps parents realize why siblings become jealous, and how we can shift how we talk to our children to reduce competition and fighting and increase cooperation.
Raising Kind Siblings is an ebook that will also help you build positive relationships between your kids so they feel seen, and valued, and heard, and loved and wanted by you and by their siblings.
10. Encourage older siblings to be helpers
To further increase my daughter’s ownership over our newest family member and to help her adjust to the changes, I implored her to help to include her, to empower her, and to make her feel valued.
I asked her to get me a diaper, or reach my water, or pour water over the baby’s legs during bath time to keep him warm.
When the baby was older, I asked my daughter to help feed the baby, read to the baby, and stack the baby food in the pantry shelves after grocery shopping.
And as my baby grew, my eldest started helping put on shoes, reading books, and walking them to the car.
All of these times where it felt natural to help their siblings sets my children up for helping each other now that they’re older. They know they can count on each other for assistance in tying shoes, reaching something high up, and learning how to balance on a skateboard.
11. Create a Strong Family Identity
We also work hard to create a strong family identity so that our kids feel part of something special so they want to spend time together, with their siblings.
Take family walks together, read books as a family together, or start a new family ritual.
Building up your family to be a safe place for your kids is essential to creating positive relationships and maintaining their mental health.
It also creates a fun, inclusive environment for us all to be seen, loved, heard valued, and appreciated where everyone actually enjoys each other.
Here’s how we Build a Strong Family Identity.
12. Create Siblings Books
Even after doing all of these things, my eldest daughter still didn’t love the fact that her siblings were now part of her world. Some days I think she would have been content to be an only child.
But that doesn’t work for me.
I need her to enjoy her siblings. Have fun with them. Want to be with them. Love them and love being with them.
So I created a Sibling Book to help her realize how much she enjoys being with her siblings.
To make one, I searched through all the pictures I had of my daughter and my son. I printed out pictures of them playing together, helping each other, and enjoying each other’s company.
Get instructions on how to make a sibling book to build a positive relationship for your kids here.
Then we read the book every day.
One day they’ll look back on those books I have now shoved in storage a decade after I made them and I’ll tell them the story about why I made the books.
I’ll remind them that they will always have each other and so they’ll always have someone they can turn to.
And that’s why even though parenting the two of them was in fact triple the work, it was worth every second of the crazy ride we’ve been on.
Because I gave them the best gift I could ever give them: each other.
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