Gentle Parenting
Five Non Coercive Ways to Help Your Child Welcome a New Sibling
easing the way to a new family dynamic
Welcoming a new baby can be a major upheaval in a household.
For a toddler or preschooler, it may be the biggest change that occurs. Parents often struggle as their older child hits, scratches or has an increase in upset. Children may struggle with being too rough in their love for the new baby. They don’t always understand they can’t squeeze or tote the baby around. They may try to wake baby — in part to test their power and cause & effect.
As a new parent, your older child looks like a giant compared to the newbie.
Your biological instinct is to protect your most vulnerable.
When you become frustrated, remind yourself your child is also having a hard time.
Here are tips for helping your older child process their jealousy and upset and give them outlets for their emotions.
Preemptively, connection is helpful.
High energy play, power play, and laughter/silliness are great for reducing tension in everyone.
Focus on keeping connection during baby care time. During feeding time and sleep, bringing out a special basket of toys, reading books, or watching a show together. As often as you can, spend time solo with older kids. It isn’t always possible, but give them attention when you can.
By giving preemptive connection you can help older kids feel secure in their new place in the family.
Always keep sibling interactions supervised.
We cannot safely leave young kids alone with a baby. They lack the impulse control to keep from being rough. Focus on what your older child can do with the baby. “Gentle touches on baby’s feet” and “hold the toy this far away so baby can see.”
By helping them you keep everyone safe and help your older child know how to interact.
Embrace behaviour you don’t want.
This will reduce the power struggles in your relationship. We can also use it as connectIon. If an older sibling is being loud when the baby is sleeping, our instinct is to tell them no, which makes them louder. If we encourage them to yell more, they often lose interest.
Working with your child has better results than control.
Empathy
In a perfect world, we’d avoid all upset, but in the real world, children have and express big emotions.
Always respond with empathy. Here’s an example.
Child trying to hit baby: go away
Parent: you seem upset.
Child: I don’t like the baby
Parent: You don’t like the baby. That sounds tough. It’s hard having the baby live with us.
Child: Yeah, I want it to go away.
Parent: oh you want baby to go away. That sounds like a yucky feeling. It helps me to get my yucky feelings out by stomping around. What would help you?
Redirect Aggression
Another issue that parents come across is aggression, hitting, biting, scratching. We can embrace those as well.
Child: ~*hitting*~
Parent: Oh you’re so mad that you want to hit and punch and hurt me.
Child: I hate you *smack*
Parent: I see that, can you punch my hand again to show me how mad you are?
Child: punch.
Parent: good one. I’m going to punch this pillow for how mad I am. Okay my hands are ready again for you to hit if you’re still feeling mad.
Kids need to express the energy they are feeling, but we can guide them to less harmful more connecting ways of expressing their emotions.
We need to keep a connection with children instead of pushing them away by embracing their behaviors. When we let go of control, we reduce conflict and create a better parent-child relationship. We also stop relying on coercion to keep children in line.
And this always creates more connection long term.
