Thanks!

Second time around we went to Taiwan for 6 weeks during parental leave, which was incredible – night markets, hot springs, a cat village, and bin lorries that drive around playing tunes like ice-cream vans. There was definitely plenty to keep a toddler entertained.

I think we’ve largely taken the same approach, and I don’t think I’d change any of the points above – we’re both still working part-time, and it’s lovely to be able to spend time with both of them. We started the oldest on swimming, gymnastics and piano lessons at about age 3, to start easing them into the idea of instruction, and they’re now at nursery two days a week as well, in preparation for starting primary school soon. The piano in particular is going very well – we now have a routine where we help them to practice every evening before bed, and they have started making up their own tunes for fun.

Having tracked various things quite carefully, it’s very easy to see the differences, but in reality they are very small considering how different they could be. Our second’s language acquisition was surprisingly similar to our first, which is probably partly due to us strongly discouraging our eldest from speaking for them (definitely something that would have happened a lot without our intervention, and would have reduced the youngest’s need to express themself). They learned to walk a month earlier (having a sibling to chase around probably helped), and daytime potty training happened about a month earlier too. On the other hand, they have been slightly less interested in letters so far (at age 2 they recognise a handful of letters), and nighttime potty training is taking a bit longer. On the whole, much less regression to the mean than I had thought might happen.

We’ve upgraded both of them to double beds. This might sound ridiculous at first, but we know several people that have either had to set up a camp bed in their child’s room when their child is sick, or allowed the child to sleep in the parent’s bed which has then been hard to undo. Having a double bed in their room allows one of us to pile in with them when they’re really poorly, but it also makes it less cramped to read them a bedtime story, and it gives them a bigger space to jump around on without falling off! It also reduces the number of different sizes of white bedsheet that we have to sort when doing laundry.

I think the biggest thing that we’ve done that isn’t covered by this article is our efforts in trying to make sure that they get on with each other. I don’t think there’s anything particularly innovative or unusual about what we did, but I’ll include it anyway. From the very start, we tried to prevent the oldest developing resentment to the new baby by avoiding associating the baby with our being busy. Rather than framing situations as “I can’t do that right now because I’m dealing with the baby”, we went with things like “I’ll be with you in a couple of minutes – can you make me a pretend ice-cream while you wait please?” – this is definitely harder than it sounds though…

Once the youngest was mobile and starting to use words, we very much avoided “leaving them to sort it out among themselves” – we tried to encourage both of them to communicate their desires, listen to the other (words and body language), respect each other’s bodily autonomy, and generally be kind. This took a lot of intervention and repetition, but it has definitely paid off – we can now actually leave them to sort it out among themselves, and they manage it about 50% of the time. The other 50% of the time unsurprisingly devolves into shoving and screaming, but even then, they are usually contrite and will apologise to each other afterwards.

Realistically, I think that this approach made the first couple of years of having two kids significantly more effort, as we were not only managing twice as many children, but we were managing their relationship with each other as well. That being said, I think (fingers crossed) that the effort has paid off, and we’re now finding that it takes much less active management. Despite the two year age gap, they will now often play together quite happily, and are very happy to see each other whenever they’ve been apart – a roaring success as far as I am concerned.