Parenting is real on-the-job training. You can read about it, talk about it and theorize about it, but until you actually begin to raise your first child, hardly anyone really knows what to do. It’s natural to overly protect, overly care for and excessively dote on your oldest child. And it’s also okay to make course corrections on the younger. Will your children notice and feel the differences? Probably. So just talk about it with them and let them know you love them both equally but you’ve learned some things first time around and you’d like to do better the second time. If you’re open about it—and flexible—they’ll be more understanding than you might think.



Sometimes the older child feels responsible for the younger—and that sense of responsibility can follow into adulthood. This child may also be the apple of his parent’s eye and hold the dreams and promises his parents were never able to fulfill for themselves. The younger can feel like the baby—entitled just because no one came after her to knock her off her pedestal. She might even feel guilty for having been the center of attention for so long and for having gotten more lenient treatment from her parents.

 

As Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist said long ago, a parent’s job is to really get to know each child and then spend the rest of that child’s life celebrating him. So notice the qualities, traits and talents of each of your children and purposefully affirm and support the oldest, the youngest and those in the middle so they all know how valuable and how precious they are to you.