New Mummy Blog: Feeling Guilty About Having A Second Baby

Is it normal to feel guilty when pregnant with your second child? Because we do.

While we can’t wait for our new baby to arrive, we can’t help but feel a little awful about what it means for our firstborn.

I look at Honor, so happy and content in her little bubble at the centre of our universe – and so oblivious that the bubble is about to pop.

It’s not that she won’t still be in that bubble, or that she’s going to have to move over to make room; we know that the centre of our universe will just expand to include number two alongside her. But this in itself is going to be enough of a shock for her. She’s going to have to share us.

Will Having To Share Change Honor?
I wonder what the impact will be on her; whether it will change her. All the research that has been done on sibling order and personality traits fascinates me.

Both Adam and I are middle children – the ones who burst the bubble for our older sibling, and of course we don’t think our parents should have felt guilty about our arrival.

But we do both suffer from what we joke is second child syndrome; a sort of suspicion we’ve been hard done by somehow. Whether it’s the result of a childhood of hand-me-downs, or the fact that we always reach milestones and life events after our older siblings have been there and done that, we can’t quite escape it.

And it’s not just the following in the footsteps of a brother or sister two years older. There’s also the younger sibling, who came along three or four years after us to snatch away our title of baby of the family.

Neither my parents nor Adam’s showed favouritism to make us feel left out or hard done by. I think it’s simply the nature of our unavoidable place in the family pecking order that has left us with this odd hangover into adulthood.

It leads me to wonder what it will mean for Honor. Will she be a different person with a different future now, than if she had remained an only child forever, or even just for longer?

She’s a sociable child, good with others and great at sharing, but she’s at nursery full-time which means we haven’t necessarily been able to treat her like an only child in many ways. So perhaps having a sibling at home won’t be too big a shock for her.

And although it’s the psychological impact of child birth order that fascinates me, it’s not the only consideration. Apparently a younger sibling can be bad for your health too.

According to this study a couple of years ago, a little brother or sister can give a child high blood pressure.

And all this is before I’ve even looked at what the effect of being second-born will be on the new baby.

Who knew introducing a fourth member into our little family could be such a minefield?

[The Psychology Of Sibling Rivalry]

[New Mummy Guilt: Is There A Perfect Age Gap Between Children?]