Preparing siblings for a new baby

The thing nobody says out loud is that you are about to do something to your first child that they did not ask for, and that you will feel guilty about it at some point in the first fortnight.

You are not. But the feeling arrives anyway, so it helps to know it is coming.

When to tell them

Later than you tell adults. Small children have no useful sense of time, and four months of waiting is unbearable and abstract for a three-year-old.

Somewhere around the point it becomes visible, or when they start asking, is usually about right. Older children can know earlier and often notice before you say anything.

What helps beforehand

• Move any big changes — a new bed, a room swap, starting nursery — well before the birth or well after, never in the same fortnight
• Be honest that newborns cry, feed constantly and cannot play. The sibling who was promised a playmate is the one who feels cheated
• Let them help choose something small for the baby
• Practise gentle hands on a doll, without making it a lesson
• Tell them plainly who will look after them while you are having the baby, and let them meet that plan in advance

Expect it to go backwards

Regression is the normal response and it is not manipulation. A newly dry child may start having accidents. A child who slept through may stop. Baby talk often reappears.

They are testing whether the terms of being a small person in this family still apply now that there is a smaller one. Meeting the regression calmly answers the question faster than correcting it does.

The behaviour is the question. The answer they need is that being little still gets them what it always got them.

In the first weeks

• Give the older one something the baby can't have — a story only they get, a job only they can do
• Let visitors know to greet the older child first. Most will, if told
• Say the true thing out loud: "the baby needs a lot right now, and that's hard"
• Feed times can be their times too — a basket of books that only comes out then works better than asking them to wait
• Take a photo of them holding the baby, and give it to them. Being the big one should have some visible status attached

About the jealousy

It is not a character flaw and it does not predict anything about their relationship later. It is a reasonable response to a genuine loss of attention.

Naming it helps more than reassuring it away. "You wish it was just us sometimes" lands better than "but you love your sister", and it does not need to be argued with.

And for you

Dividing yourself between a newborn and a bereft three-year-old is one of the harder passages of early motherhood, and doing it badly some days is not a verdict.

It settles. Usually faster than it feels like it will from inside the first month.