When we told our three-year-old she was going to be a big sister, she said “okay” and asked for a snack. That pretty much set the tone. She had no idea what was coming, and honestly, neither did we.
We did a bunch of preparation stuff. Some of it was genuinely useful. Some of it I’m embarrassed we bothered with. Here’s the full rundown.
What actually helped:
We got her a baby doll about two months before the due date. Not as a gift with a big speech, just left it around. She started copying what she saw: wrapping it in a blanket, patting its back. When her brother arrived, she already had a script for what babies were. That doll did more work than every book we bought combined.
We also moved her to the “big kid bed” three months early. A friend warned us that if we moved her right when the baby came, she’d connect the two events and resent the baby for stealing her crib. That advice was gold. By the time her brother arrived, the bed was old news.
And we started talking about the baby in boring, concrete terms. Not “you’re going to have a best friend!” but “the baby will cry a lot and sleep a lot and won’t be able to play for a while.” I think a lot of parents oversell it and then the kid feels betrayed when the baby turns out to be a loud potato. Low expectations, honestly, are a gift.
What flopped:
We bought a stack of “I’m a big sibling!” books. She was not interested. We read two of them once each. The rest are still on the shelf, pristine. Save your money.
We also made the mistake of telling everyone in front of her how excited she was. “She’s SO excited to be a big sister!” She wasn’t, particularly, and I think all that projected excitement made her feel like she was supposed to perform happiness she didn’t feel. Once the baby came and she was ambivalent, she seemed almost guilty about it. That one’s on us.
The first two weeks were rough, I’m not going to sugarcoat it. She asked us to put the baby back twice. She had a regression where she wanted a bottle again, which was startling. Our pediatrician said this was completely normal and would pass, and it did, in about a month.
The thing that got us through was protecting her one-on-one time like it was sacred. Fifteen minutes a day where the baby was with my wife and it was just me and my daughter, doing whatever she wanted. No phone. That fifteen minutes did more for her behavior than all the preparation combined.
Six months in, she adores him. She sings to him when he cries. The other day she told me, completely unprompted, “I’m glad the baby stayed.” I almost cried into the laundry.
If you’re about to do this: prepare less, protect the one-on-one time more, and don’t panic at the regression. They’re not losing it. They’re just making room.