Tiny new person

[liv]

So my partners and metamour had a baby this week! It's very exciting, but also very weird because we are quarantined apart. I had been a bit nervous and a lot excited about forming a relationship with a child from birth (I suppose that was the case with my siblings, but the period when I was aged 2-6 doesn't count in quite the same way.) But now that's not really going to happen; I'm planning to carry on waving to her from 2m away, but babies don't bond to people who occasionally wave from 2m away.

There's no point being sad about no baby cuddles; I'm already properly sad about having to stay physically distanced from my actual partners and the middle two children whom I miss desperately. Family life during a a pandemic is weird, but that's hardly news.

I started spending extended time with her older siblings when they were 2 1/2 and 6 (now 8 and 11). The thing I found most difficult about interacting with younger children is how emotionally intense they are. Does anyone have any advice (from personal experience or theoretical knowledge) about how to cope when people you care about find every small setback or frustration devastatingly upsetting? It's something I want to do better this time. Note that I don't want advice on how to prevent small children from inconveniently expressing emotions around me, I just want to find better ways of handling my own feelings.

It's probably a skill worth learning in general, because with a terrifying global pandemic everybody is more emotionally on edge than usual. And of course it's something that all parents must manage somehow. I just... don't see it talked about a lot in eg parenting guides.

Comments

[silveradept]

Congratulations to the new child.

A lot of the early years, based on my escorting adjacent to direct parenting is recognizing that smalls have limited methods of expressing themselves. Part of the reason baby signs are so popular here in the States is that the connection between gesture and action happens before words and actions, and a small that can express their needs is a small that can get those needs met sooner.

Which sometimes means having to put names to feelings and working with a small to build resilience where possible. And sometimes that means having smaller forms of those emotions around smalls and explaining to them how to cope or mitigate them. In my part, it means that if someone is having a feeling in the library space, it means acknowledging the feeling, and not shaming anyone for having it or for having a child that has feelings.

And, if need be, absenting myself so that I can have the intense version of the feeling and then come back with the less intense version.

[liv]

I rather love the idea of congratulating the actual baby on being born. Most people seem to congratulate the relatives.

Your librarian experience is really helpful here, because of course you're not an automatic source of comfort just by existing near the upset small person. It's really helpful to think of the distress as partly resulting from communication gaps. And even with spoken language children's understanding is often way ahead of their expression so it can be worth explaining or providing names for feelings.

[silveradept]

The relatives deserve congratulations for their part as well, but childbirth is still a thing fraught with possibilities where it could all go wrong, so successful birth is a congratulations to the child, as well.

In the library space, regardless of the age of the upset person, I've found that if they have the capacity to communicate what they actually want, we have a much better time figuring out how to provide that (and it can de-escalate situations where people say they want one thing that is entirely not appropriate, but what they actually want is something that is entirely appropriate to ask for.)

I try to explicitly foreground in my story times that some children are wigglers, some are runners, and some can sit still, and that there's nothing wrong with any of them, and if someone needs to pop out of story time, that's fine, no shame. (And then have a story time where there's lots of movement with a few bits of sitting still.)