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Helping an Older Child Adjust to a New Baby: What to Expect and What Helps

The older child who responded to the news of a new baby with delight may now be hitting the baby, refusing to eat, and wetting the bed again at 3.5 ye...

4 min read

Play

How to Adapt One Game for Different Ages

When there are children of different ages in the same family or group, designing an activity that works for all of them is a practical challenge. A ga...

2 min read

Parenting

Why Sibling Rivalry Is Normal and How to Respond

By dinner on a Tuesday, your 4-year-old has accused her brother of cheating, taken his block tower down, and refused to sit at the same table. You fee...

Parenting

How Siblings Affect Each Other's Development

Watch a 2-year-old try to copy his 5-year-old sister tying her shoe. He won't get it — but he's tracking her hands with the focus most adults can't su...

Supporting Each Child's Individuality in Twins

The world treats twins as a category before it treats them as people. From pregnancy onwards — "are you having the twins?" — the language collapses tw...

11 min read

Sibling Relationships in Early Childhood

The most thorough body of work on early sibling relationships comes from Judy Dunn at Cambridge and a generation of researchers (Howe, Volling, Brody,...

Sibling Jealousy: Causes and Signs

The first time your two-year-old hits the new baby, or "accidentally" sits on the bouncer, or sweetly whispers "go back" — most parents are surprised...

Helping an Older Child Adjust to a New Baby

Having a new baby is the most significant change that can happen to a child who has previously been an only child. They're not just getting a sibling—...

How to Help an Older Child Accept a Younger Sibling

Sibling acceptance is not a destination you arrive at—it's a relationship that develops over time, in both directions, through shared experience. Rese...

A Family With a Newborn and a Toddler

The combination of a newborn and a toddler in the same household is a specific and well-documented parenting challenge. The newborn needs constant res...

Differences in the Needs of Younger and Older Children

The most common source of frustration in families with multiple children is applying the same expectations and responses across different developmenta...

Managing Conflicts Between Children at Home

Research on sibling relationships finds that siblings between the ages of two and four have a conflict roughly every 17 minutes on average. That numbe...

Family Life With Young Children: Routines, Relationships, and Resilience

Adding a young child to a household changes it in ways that parents consistently underestimate. The predictable shifts—less sleep, less money, less sp...

8 min read

Family Dynamics When One Child Has a Disability

When one child in a family has a disability—whether present from birth or diagnosed during childhood—the whole family adapts. This isn't a metaphor: s...

How to Divide Attention Between Children of Different Ages

When a second child arrives, parents often experience a sudden, concrete realisation: there is one of me and two of them. Every moment with the baby i...

Relationships With Cousins and Other Relatives

Cousins sit in a sweet spot that no other relationship quite occupies: they share your family history but aren't your siblings, they're peers but with...