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

[antisoppist]

As others have said, it took me a while to get from a) fix the upsetting thing and make it stop to b) it is OK to be upset about things and there are options other than fix the thing or make the child pretend to not have feelings. And I was belatedly working this out for myself at the time so not doing what my parents did was a good start (my mother banned balloons for all of us for ever because I cried over a burst balloon when I was two - this does not build resilience or the ability to cope with setbacks or to allow yourself to have feelings about things!)

But otherwise I treated mine as people with their own opinions about things from the start and they all needed different parenting because they are all different people. Number 2 was 2 before I realised he was an extrovert and was not actually enjoying the quiet days at home I'd factored in to recover from having gone to playgroup the day before. But I did work it out because I wasn't automatically assuming what he wanted was what I would want or his older sibling would have wanted. Not that you can always have life the way you want it but people of any age are more amenable to having things not the way they want them if their wants are listened to even if they can't have them and they do get them met some of the time. Not babies though. Babies cannot be reasoned with.

[liv]

Thank you, it's good to be reminded that it is sometimes ok to be upset about things. I might not find it easy to be around someone in intense distress, but it's a normal part of life and you have to build resilience and cope by starting out having very little.

And I am appreciating all the people reminding me that children are individuals and not just representatives of their age band. I like the thought that responding to some reasonable wants makes it easier when the child can't, for a good reason, have exactly what they want.