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My kids fight sometimes. Of course they do. But I have long thought that well-meaning parents actually cause much of the sibling rivalry that worries them so. Most parenting magazines, sooner or later, run an article for parents expecting baby #2, explaining how to guide the usurped older child through the horror and the devastation of bringing a new baby into the home.
Now, I don’t mean to be a pollyanna about what really happens. Sometimes it’s not pretty. Overall, it’s about 98% good for older kids to have another sibling join the family. But that other 2% of the time can be a little bloody. Many’s the time I’ve had to intervene when the toddler starts out patting the baby gently, and somehow, without really meaning to, ends up rhythmically whacking the baby as hard as he can. Nice baby, nice baby, nice baby, Nice!!! Baby!!! Nice!!! Baby!!!
So there are any number of books and articles about how to prepare the older kids for the newest arrival. You should explain in detail what to expect (newborn brothers can’t learn to play football right away), you remind them of how they’re allowed to eat ice cream and poor silly baby can’t, you make a fuss over them, you let them have private time with mom and dad, etc.
This is all fine, but I do think it goes overboard a little bit. Angelina Ballerina, for instance, is a good example of a kid who is just being a jerk about it, and needs to be taken down a peg or two. She trashes her room, as I recall, and firebombs Mrs. Hodgepodge’s potting shed. Or something. To make it up to her, they name her sister of the year and buy her a private island. Or something. I hate that mouse.
Anyway, the foregone conclusion in these ostensibly helpful books is that, by having a baby, you are wrecking your original kid’s world, and your main job now is to make atonement, and help them put back together the tatters of their former, only-childish happiness.
Naturally, kids pick up on this attitude. If you are very afraid they will react badly, then they usually will. I have found it much more helpful to be very matter-of-fact about the new baby. Of course you keep a close eye on the older kid’s reactions, and are kind, patient and understanding. But don’t get carried away.
What is much more disturbing, however, is a new trend I’ve noticed in children’s books: the “how to help your pet deal with the new baby” genre. I’ve seen two or three in the last few weeks, and I don’t get it.
Okay, I understand that you love your pup, and you don’t want him to be unhappy. He’s been an Only Dog for many years, and this will be an adjustment. Also, you want to avoid any revenge pooping, and you don’t want him to eat the new baby, either. So it makes practical sense for there to be some guidance on how to prepare your pet for the new baby.
But … why are there children’s books about it? Who are they for? I do not understand. I suppose these books are not necessarily instructive manuals, and it might be interesting for a child to read a story from a dog’s point of view. And story books reflect whatever happens to be going on in the culture at large. It’s become more common for couples to have a pet in the family for many years, and then, after long deliberation, they take the big leap and go ahead and buy a baby. So, people write about what they know, and this is why there are books about it.
Echh, I don’t know, it still gives me the creeps. I have the terrible suspicion that these picture books are for parents, who harbor some kind of resentment toward their own child, and want reassurance that everything will be okay, but don’t want to admit to anyone that they’re scared of their own newborn.
Or, or, are the adults reading these books to their dogs? Am I making too much of this? Just what is going on here? Anyone?
(Cross-posted at I have to sit down)
I am a psychiatric NP and very often I hear the comment “my cats/dogs are my children”! Often these women (men never say this) are sufferring from severe anxiety. I wonder if the anxiety is because their world view is severely whacked?
Sibling rivalry can be avoided if the parents work at it.
Here was my formula:
http://www.e-gracenotes.org/article.php?id=2585
Incidentally, I never had a problem with dogs accepting new children. I was pack alpha male. My wife was pack alpha female. We simply made sure the rest of the pack (two-legged and four-legged) understood that. (For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack. it’s true.)
I think the theory is that kids can’t bear to admit that they don’t want the new baby, so it’s better to let them use a dog character to express their horrid hidden feelings.
However, it seems more like parents can’t bear to get books about how Child 1 might have less than pretty feelings about anything, much less about Child 2. People seem very reluctant to admit that children have ugly feelings or can get upset for more than a minute, because their child must be Perfect (because they’ve put so much money into this model, and Bad Stuff reflects on them as parents!) and perfectly resilient (because they plan to inflict Bad Stuff on the kids and not feel guilty, and then work out their guilt on things that the kids really don’t mind).
But maybe I’m overcynicking this.
The truth is the first born considers the new child the upsurper. Because it is. And in times of really true limited resources, the underlying feeling was not irrational. But you are right, the vast majority of children benefit from a sibling–if only in learning to deal with conflicts. We will see the fruits of China experiment with one family, one child soon enough. My prediction is it will not be good.
As for harboring bad thoughts to pets (not a new child scenerio but still) I admit it. I harbor bad thoughts about the cat. It has this annoying habit of scratching the screens to let us know it wants in. Now the prior owners of our house had a cat that apparently did the same thing, so the screens are trashed.
But now my wife and I want to replace the windows. But we can’t. Because the cat will scratch them. And then we would be really mad.
And my six year old loves the cat.
So my wife and I have been letting the cat out at night. Que Sera Sera.
Are we wrong to do that?
I had to laugh at your characterization of Angelina Ballerina. It’s my daughter’s favorite show (the British version, the American version is souless) but I can’t figure out how we’re supposed to take Angelina–she’s presented as a scrappy likeable striver, but I find her a narcissistic drama queen and it’s sickening how her friends dote on her and she always gets what she wants in the end while hardly ever looking like the bad guy.
That said, the one episode you call her out on is one of the few where I side with Angelina. When her sister Polly came along, her parents practically forgot about Angelina, they broke promises, missed events, let her go hungry, didn’t care. Of course she acted out.
Yeah, you’re right, Tim. Maybe the book is different (I haven’t seen that episode of the show), but the whole family behaves badly!
The show also makes me feel very uncomfortable because of the constant grunting and moaning noises the characters make. Anyone else notice this? It’s kind of bizarre.
–Simcha
Dear Simcha,
Thank you for the trip down memory lane and for anyone who would want me to write a book about “IT” then please advance me a certified cheque in the amount of $1,000,000.00 and I’ll consider writing about “IT”.
I hear ya! Thanks for not wanting to share any of your long experiences with us at this time and like they say in French, ‘What will be will be’. Don’t call U>S Victor, we’ll call you!
For what “IT” is worth, I was born in the year of the dog!
Like they say in French, ‘What will be will be’!
Peace
Joe, You made me laugh re: the cat. It’s become part of the family lore, how mom (me) “lost” the cat – that would be the cat that was completely ignored except when she scratched the toddler, the cat that only I fed, the cat that wouldn’t eat the same thing two days running, the cat that had cat food dishes that I kept tripping on. At any rate, I’m all for parents “losing” such cats. Although, it did take two weeks for any of my kids to notice that the cat had not been around lately…and if your kid loves the cat you may have to be a little more caring than “mom”. (15 years late I still hear about it)
When our oldest was 9 months old, we discovered she was going to have a sibling. It really wasn’t much of an issue, because she was only 18 months old herself. When I would nurse the baby, she’d pull up her shirt and ‘nurse’ her babydoll, and I always had some way for her to ‘help’ – like handing me a diaper or whatnot.
The worst sibling problem we ever had (and it wasn’t all that bad) was with our third, a son, and bringing his baby sister home. He was angry with me, and wouldn’t even look at me for two whole days. The girls fussed over the baby, the boy pretended she wasn’t there. He was two. Two days later, I put the baby in a little seat on the floor, and he casually wandered over and patted her twice on the head, and I knew it was going to be OK. He became her favorite playmate. The two of them have always been very close.
As there are 8 kids all together, and we’ve since gotten a variety of dogs and have always had at least one cat, we’ve kept an eye out for problems, but never really had any. Maybe because, as in the case of Mark L., my husband and I are alpha – the animals and children know this and live accordingly. I didn’t need to read a book about it, either.
We never really had a problem with the kids being jealous of the baby. I was a little worried about how #3 would deal with our recent addition because she tends to be the most possessive in general and she’s only two. But instead of jealous of me and the baby, she gets jealous if anyone else besides me loves on “her” baby.
Oh, and I saw a car magnet a few months ago that read “I (heart) my granddog!”
My former next door neighbor – now an attorney, then an angry child – once transported her new baby brother to the family’s trash container and deposited him there for pickup. New mother, being vigilant, managed to find him pretty quickly and inquired as to the purpose for this naughty behavior. The response: “He’s smelly and noisy and we really don’t need him because I am here!” thus displaying the egotism needed (I think) to practice law! Or at least that’s what I tell her when I want to jerk a very old and dear friend’s chain!
Our oldest son greeted our third child, our second daughter, by bulldozing her soft little scalp with his Tonka bulldozer — and that was back in the day when Tonka bulldozers could do some serious bulldozing!
Thankfully, our pediatrician had eight children himself and had seen it all, otherwise we’d probably have been reported to CPS.
Those “furbaby” people (yes, they refer to their dogs and cats as “furbabies” — sort of sets your teeth on edge, doesn’t it? Euw.) are both creepy and tragic at the same time. Especially if you’ve ever watched an episode of Animal Hoarders. Sad that they feel so rejected by humanity, sad they feel humanity cannot be trusted, and sad that they honestly believe, in their distorted way, they are doing the best thing for those animals even though they’re really causing them suffering and disease and death.
One wonders how many future Timothy Treadwells we’re raising with all this blurring of the line between babies and animals.
Also — check out the rhetoric from the online manifesto that gunman down in Silver Springs:
“All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions.”
Most pets-as-children stories are amusing at best and merely annoying at worst, but there’s something dangerous going on behind the mindset.
Great post, Simcha. Another annoying “take” on the new sibling situation is the book “Julius, the Baby of the World” by Kevin Henkes. Lilly (of Lilly with the purple, plastic purse fame) is as unlikable as Angelina. At one point, Lilly says this about her brother, “If Julius was a number he would be zero. If he were food, he would be a raisin. Zero is nothing and a raisin tastes like dirt.” There is a change of heart at the end of the story, but I had to editorialize much of the story.
When we were expecting our second child, we read those books to our firstborn — he still resents the younger children. Eventually, I came on the strategy of pointing out to the soon-to-be-older sibling how much the new baby loved them, and how they get to be “big” to someone. None of the younger ones ever had much of a problem. Babies were wonderful, miraculous, welcome additions to our home, and thats that.
One of our favorite family memories is my husband reading that Angelina story to the small folk and without missing a beat when it comes to the part where she is trashing her room over the new baby he “reads” something to the effect:
“Angelina’s parents swiftly swatted her, put all her toys in a black trash bag,and took them to Goodwill.” The End.
Absolute best take on the pets-as-children phenomenon is the dog show mockumentary “Best in Show.” I have never, ever laughed harder at a movie.
Having worked as a volunteer in an animal shelter I can tell you what gave ME “the creeps” was watching dogs be turned in by their human families with “we must surrender dog as we are having a baby” on the intake tag. Bullcr*p! Lazy a** people who would dump a living, feeling creature rather than consult a local vet, a local library, or a local video store for info, books and tapes on prepping the dog and home for baby’s arrival. Many of these loving dogs would stand in their cages staring at the door through which their less-than-devoted humans had left; stare until they were, if lucky, adopted or, as too often happened, killed as “surplus”.
Perhaps my fondness for the Marines is that I share their motto (or paraphrase it): Leave no family member (no matter how hairy or hairless) behind! Of course, I am the older of two so perhaps it was easy to empathize with the dogs!
Its true. These people are seriously disordered. They carry dogs in pink baby strollers now. 2 nights ago I tried shoe shopping next to a lady in her 50s or 60s who was carrying her dog like a baby. I reached for a shoe on the sale rack and nearly lost my hand.
Not a bad strategy for getting all the good shoes tho’…
The the miniature dog tried to take out a teenager who had Down Syndrome when she approached with delight to see the doggie.
Ug. So sick of these fettishy-dog-baby-swappers.
I disagree. One of my good friends was shaken by a dog as a kid, and the owners insisted the terrier was playing. That terrier later played with a newborn and killed it.
Not all dogs are equally safe with children. Bravo to parents who err on the side of caution. Animals are wonderful, godly stewardship is important, but the bottom line is that human babies come before animal ones. If that means Fido goes to the pound, then that’s what it means.
I think too many of those “oh noes a nasty sibling” books” lead otherwise rational, reasonably nice children to think that the way to adapt to siblings is to throw a fit, get nice extras from Mom and Dad, and then grudgingly tolerate the grubby newcomer. I agree with your assessment that the anxiety in question is the parents’, not the child’s.
I’ve got only 5 living so far, and they’re upset with me for not producing more siblings yet (I’m tryin’! I’m tryin’!). And I don’t think it’s thanks to my wonderful parenting skills, of which I have none. I think kids are just like that, unless taught to be otherwise.
honestly, we don’t have cathartic picture books describing children using diaper doo as wall paint (at least I HOPE we don’t); if we did, I bet more kids would stinky-marker the walls.
Great post! We had friends whose first child, then about 18 months, drew yellow permanent-marker “hair” on the cue-ball head of their second-born, then maybe a month old. They had to bring him to church like that — fortunately it was yellow and not black, so you had to stare at the baby for a while before his head started to look funny. But then it really did look funny.
Nobody is saying that it’s necessarily easy to get pets used to new babies, or even that all pets are safe with kids. But it’s an adult human’s place either to train the pet or have it trained, or to place the pet with a friend or relation if nothing can be done. Shelters are supposed to be a last ditch option; a lot of people just use them to ditch their pets because they can’t be bothered.
I don’t consider my dogs to be my children, but I’m a single man who is not married with no real interest in getting married and no interest in having children, either. I’ve got many nieces and nephews and being around them as they’ve been growing up has convinced me I’m not really cut out to be a parent. I’m crazy about my dogs, though. I’m not an ideal dog parent, either, but I certainly don’t pamper them or talk about them as though they were children, like some people I’ve heard of (or even met).