Siblings in a home!

This papaya tree in our garden is always with blossoms. It is a tree with papaya ready to pluck and with fresh ones growing, along with successive generations of flowers. 

I have often looked at this phenomenon and viewed a family symbolically. A family is a generations of people born within its fold. 

The flowers of one generation are like sibling in a home!

The siblings are of different ages, boys or girls or teenagers or young adults or married adults. 

Let me share some thoughts on siblings who happen to be children!

1. Birth of a sibling

It is only when a sibling is born, the older child feels the difference it makes to him or her in the family ambience. The infant from the time he or she is born takes precedence in attention and care. The older sibling receives similar attention and protection. Most older siblings would not have a memory of such times as they were too young to register the experiences. The older sibling watching the way an infant is cared for, might become a partner with the family to welcome the infant or can express reactions towards the baby to indicate his or her displeasure. A horrible word that exists in literature- 'sibling rivalry' is an unnecessary judgemental statement about what is normal. An older child feels displaced on arrival of a brother or sister. It is the parents who would have to foresee from the time a mother is pregnant, to include the older child in the transition planning, to make the older child endear himself or herself to the child when he or she arrives. There are several ways this can be done and let me defer the details at this column. 

2. Sibling behaviours

An infant is on his or her mother's breasts on several occasions during the day. Any sibling less than five or so years can watch and would accept when his or her mother is a mother to another child, provided he or she also gets due attention and feel included in the transition in the family. But there can be some older siblings who  can interpret mother's nearness to his or her younger sibling as the mother 'being fond of a younger sibling'. It is this feeling of displacement, which creates a feeling of 'marginalised', which gets expressed by reactive behaviour from an older sibling. A four year old sibling who is used to eating his or her food by oneself now can turn to mother to be fed.  The older child can show behaviour of insistence which parents had not noticed thus far. It is this time which would have to be turned into a redeeming time, to restore the status of an older sibling to feel fully included in the family. There are several ways to do it. I will leave the discussion to a later blog.

3. Parental attitudes

The arrival of a new baby is an occasion of celebration in a home. Sometimes, parents inadvertently leave an older child to adjust,  rather than be a sympathiser of his or her feeling of being less important from then on.  He or she has to be helped to come to a 'shared' role as a sibling, by showing an equal priority for both children. I know of families when the father takes over the bed time story narration or reading to the older sibling, thereby not allowing the habit maintained by the mother to be lost, when the mother is otherwise occupied with a younger child. Parents alone can redeem the transition time of the older sibling to adjust to a new scenario, which an older sibling could  not have fully imagined. 

Siblings are not alike in behaviour, temperament or reactions. They need individual attention as well as joint attention. 

The parenting style would have to change when a baby arrives. 

One suggestion I might leave here is, that parents ought to have conversations about the new style of parenting which would be needed, while preparing to welcome the baby during the pregnancy period. This conversation ought to include many aspects of reorientation to a new family culture, which the birth of a baby would call for in our attitudes to other siblings!

Post  questions if you have, to expand this theme further!

M.C.Mathew(text and photo)