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“There’s going to be a baby”
A brief history of jealousy
During the spring in which I’m pregnant with my son, my father presents my daughter with a picture book. There’s Going to Be a Baby, it’s called, by John Burningham and Helen Oxenbury. The story begins when the main character, a little boy, is told by his mother that she has a baby in her tummy. The pages that follow depict the fantasies spun in his mind, fantasies about what will happen once the second child is there.
In one of these fantasies, the baby is a chef, turning the kitchen into a total mess; in another, the baby appears as a banker, literally throwing money around. When the baby features as a zookeeper, chaos ensues.
“Can’t you tell the baby to go away?” the little boy wants to know. “We don’t really need him, do we?”
Night after night, I read the book to my daughter. I try to gauge whether her feelings are as mixed as those of the protagonist, but she’s not giving much away. Her interest is drawn to the mother’s patterned dress, the large ice-cream sundae served to the little boy at a café, and the various names of the animals at the zoo. As far as I can tell, the main message has passed her by; it’s just the details that have hit home.
I wonder about the intended readership for this book. Who, exactly, needs preparing—and what for?
* * *
It might be one of my earliest memories: my little sister, suddenly there. I had just turned three at the time and was convinced, somehow, that my parents were wrong about her name.
Thinking back to her arrival, it’s that apprehension that has most remained with me, the certainty that she was really called something else, and that it wasn’t in my power to correct the mistake.
In the years that followed, my sister and I mostly argued—constantly, relentlessly, to the point of physical violence, tooth and nail.
“Your characters clashed,” is the way my mother puts it now.
“You found me irritating,” my sister says.
Or maybe I was just jealous.
* * *
The first biblical murder—that of Abel, by Cain—is the result of sibling rivalry. Many of Shakespeare’s plots revolve around envious brothers and sisters. And in the big book of Grimms’ Fairy Tales, from which I regularly read to my daughter, jealousy between children of the same family is a recurrent theme.
It’s an astonishing paradox: while we believe growing up with a brother or sister to be a good thing for a child, we’ve also, for centuries, been telling stories about the ways siblings can make each other’s lives miserable.
“For a long time I regarded my little sister as an intruder,” wrote US author Helen Keller in 1903. “I knew that I had ceased to be my mother’s only darling, and the thought filled me with jealousy.” In her autobiography, Keller describes the time when, in a fit of rage, she overturned the cradle, little sister and all: “The baby might have been killed had my mother not caught her as she fell.”1
“A fat, monstrous creature had suddenly acquired the main role,” wrote director Ingmar Bergman as he recalled the birth of his younger sister. Little Ingmar failed in his attempt to strangle the baby—his autobiography throws up a vivid image of the time he climbed onto a chair to get at her cradle, but slipped and fell to the floor.2
A friend who, like me, is the eldest in her family, tells me about an old video recording in which her younger sister, just learning to walk, proudly clambers up off the kitchen floor and wobbles toward the camera—only to be brutally thumped on the head by my friend’s clenched fist.
Can’t you tell the baby to go away? We don’t really need him, do we?
* * *
Prior to my second pregnancy, it seemed to me that the expansion of our family held only advantages for my daughter. I kept thinking of my sister and myself: of how no one has such an intimate understanding of where I come from as she does, how there’s no one with whom it’s so easy to compare notes on my parents as with her, and how lovely it is to be known, and to know someone, in that way.
I had wanted my daughter to have the same thing: an ally. But now, with spring coming to an end and that ally about to emerge, my thoughts begin to reach further back. Specifically, to our childhood. And it’s there that the image becomes much less appealing, because our childhood fighting didn’t come to an end until I left home for college, the ravages of a decade and a half of sibling warfare smoldering in my wake.
What made me think a second child was such an unequivocally good idea?
In the evenings, my daughter asleep, I click my way through a pastel-tinted online parenting forum, followed by similarly pastel-tinted parenting websites and mothering blogs. It’s easy to get lost here, in this Wonderland, where the tone switches with astonishing ease from reassuring to alarmist and back. “You will feel worse than you did the first time around,” I read, for example, in a list of “Ten Things No One Tells You About Having a Second Baby,” and, “the same things that sucked before will suck again.” Yet I’m also told not to panic, because “you will be 110 percent more chill about everything.”3
My son gently kicks me from inside. I stroke the bump as I read on.
Online, I soon notice, second children are often presented as a potential problem: they put even more pressure on their already tired parents, throw family routines into disarray, and above all they provoke a series of reactions, some desirable, some less so, in their elder sibling.
I’m reading all this because I want to know more about my second child. But what there is to read is mainly concerned with my first child: with what I can expect of her when the second one arrives. The outlook varies from a profound lack of interest to extreme anxiety, and from bed-wetting to outright jealousy, Keller and Bergman style.
Obediently, I bookmark the many recommendations on how to deal with the imminent threat. Hounded by adverts, I then order various parenting books to be sent from across the ocean.
Siblings Without Rivalry.
The Second Baby Survival Guide.
Peaceful Parent, Happy Siblings: How to Stop the Fighting and Raise Friends for Life.
Such telling titles. It’s as if rivalry and fighting are the norm, and deviation possible only with great effort. As if there’s a good chance the second baby will stifle our family, as if it’s going to be a struggle for survival when he arrives.
My partner, who’s more levelheaded than me, and who remembers a predominantly peaceful childhood with not one but two sisters, raises his eyebrows when the books arrive. How much more, he wonders, is all that extra literature supposed to teach us? I tell him I find it calming, the same information, formulated slightly differently each time. Apocalyptic, but clearly presented, and full of practical tips.
I like to think, I tell him, that a universal guide to the arrival of a second child exists somewhere, a primordial instruction manual for the months ahead.
There’s advice, for instance, on preparing our daughter in good time for what’s coming. We can do this by talking about the baby like he’s a “real person,” and by reading to her from books like There’s Going to Be a Baby.
We have to make it clear to her, I repeat to my partner, that the arrival of a second child doesn’t mean she’s loved any less, and above all we have to let her know that nothing is being taken away from her.
We can start by showing her photos of when she herself was a newborn, so she knows that she, too, drank milk out of a breast once; that she, too, used to bathe in a tiny tub, supported by big hands.
My partner nods, benevolently.
* * *
Presents are always a good idea, I read somewhere. I wouldn’t want to make things too easy on myself, so one sweltering late-spring afternoon I visit a frenzied toy shop on a bustling street. I navigate toward the pink section, in search of a baby doll we can give my daughter on behalf of her little brother, a gift to break the ice when he gets here.
The one I go for is small, with innocent eyes and a soft little hat on its head.
A cheeky little peace offering.
Standing at the counter I suddenly become aware of myself, pregnant and perspiring, attempting to extinguish a conflict that hasn’t even presented itself yet.
Later, much later, I’ll find the doll, naked and missing its hat, abandoned lifeless at the bottom of a toy basket. I’ll remember that it barely interested my daughter in the first place, that she found her little brother far more exciting. It will become clear to me that the gift said a lot about me and my expectations, and very little about my children.
I’ll ask myself how justified it was, my fear of jealousy.
But all that has yet to come to pass. Right now, summer is fast approaching. We need to find a new crib, there are hand-me-down onesies to wash, a cradle to assemble. And in between all those activities, I continue to read up on jealousy.
* * *
Immediately after William Darwin was born, his father began to make notes. It was 1839, and, besides being a brand-new father, Charles Darwin was also a scientist, with an inordinate interest in the expression of emotions.
In the first week Darwin noted that “various reflex actions, namely sneezing, hickuping, yawning, stretching, and of course sucking and screaming” were “well performed” by baby William. On the seventh day he conducted a new experiment: he touched William’s foot with a piece of paper. The baby pulled his leg up and curled his tiny toes—“like a much older child when tickled.”
After six weeks, Darwin detected a proper laugh from his son for the first time. At four months, it was clear that William could experience rage. His entire head would turn bright red when he was displeased. The baby was six months and eleven days old when his nurse pretended to cry: William promptly pulled a “melancholy face, with the corners of his mouth well depressed”—an unmistakable sign of empathy, in his father’s view. And when William was fifteen months old, and his little sister Annie was born, Charles discovered, while weighing his second child in front of his first, that his son could also be jealous: “Jealousy,” he noted, “was plainly exhibited.” (He omitted to record precisely how it looked, this exhibition of envy.)
Many years later, when Darwin published his notes in the journal Mind, he added that William’s expression of jealousy at fifteen months came relatively late. “When tried in a sufficient manner,” he suggested, infant jealousy could probably be elicited much earlier.4
* * *
Darwin was right, I learn when studying a weighty academic tome helpfully titled Handbook of Jealousy. Scientists have yet to agree upon what, exactly, jealousy is—emotion or cognition, or rather a state encompassing several emotions at the same time, including rage, fear, and sadness.5 What is known is that jealousy flares up when we’re afraid of losing something or someone to another person.
In that sense it’s useful, evolutionary psychologists say: jealousy spurs us on to combat the threat of unfaithfulness, or to put a stop to it once it has started.6 That’s handy if you want to keep your lover to yourself, but also for babies and small children who want to hold on to their parents’ attention when a sibling arrives. Early this century, psychologists performed a study in which they arranged for babies of just six months to watch while their mothers held lifelike baby dolls: the babies sulked, frowned, and cried. If the mothers held a book instead of a doll, the little participants reacted with considerably less agitation.7
None of this is surprising, I suppose. As far back as the third century AD, Augustine described a baby who couldn’t yet talk, but who was clearly “livid as it watched another infant at the breast” of its mother. “Who,” Augustine added rhetorically, “is ignorant of this?”8
What is new, Handbook of Jealousy tells me, is the bad rap jealousy is subjected to these days. In the Middle Ages, jealousy was associated with the defense of one’s honor, and in that sense was positively regarded. It was also long seen as a natural expression of love and devotion. Darwin, for one, classified little William’s jealousy as a sign of affection.
* * *
This remained the case for a long time. For his contribution to Handbook of Jealousy, historian Peter Stearns consulted old US handbooks, letters, and magazines and concluded that until the nineteenth century, jealousy between siblings simply wasn’t something parents worried about.
It hadn’t occurred to me that fear of jealousy might be a historical phenomenon, something that didn’t arise until a certain time, a certain place. The advice I incant to my partner and myself relates to a threat that one hundred and fifty years ago was not even recognized as such.
The turning point, Stearns writes, came at the end of the nineteenth century. That’s when jealousy lost its positive connotations, when it no longer fitted into an ideal vision of civilized adults, who were now expected to repress their impulses.
And because self-control could not be instilled early enough, jealousy between young siblings transformed from something at which parents shrugged their shoulders into a serious problem.9
* * *
Take Sigmund Freud. He didn’t waste a great many words on sibling relations, as he was primarily interested in the bond between parents and children. But what little he did say on the topic was devastating enough: in The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1899, Freud noted that “hostile feelings towards brothers and sisters” must take up a substantial proportion of childhood dreams.10
He later observed that a child “put into second place by the birth of a brother or sister … does not easily forgive … this loss of place”: they become “embittered,” an emotion that forms “the basis of a permanent estrangement.”11
Freud’s Austrian disciple (and later dissenter) Alfred Adler believed the arrival of a sibling to be a traumatic event for a child. The first was “dethroned” by the second, and siblings would compete for their parents’ attention and approval throughout their childhood.12
In the early-twentieth-century United States, rivalry had grown to be such an important topic in child-raising books and magazines, Stearns reports, that one could in fact speak of a widespread “sibling rivalry scare.” Parents were advised to nip it in the bud as soon as possible if they didn’t want their children to harm one another—or, at least as bad, grow up to be unstable adults.13
Even the generally mild-mannered Dr. Benjamin Spock, the bestselling child-rearing expert, cautioned, in the mid-twentieth century, that sibling jealousy should be promptly dealt with. Jealousy, he felt, was incompatible with real love, and could even get in the way of “normal” social relations. Clearly, then, there was every reason to eliminate the malignant condition in childhood.
* * *
So here’s the irony: just as jealousy between children from the same family was becoming a phenomenon to be feared, those very families actually began to shrink. In many industrialized countries, the end of the nineteenth century saw the “demographic transition” take hold: child mortality rates declined and, not long afterward, so did the average number of children per family.
Evolutionary biologists have no trouble explaining this transition. If your children have a better chance of surviving and reproducing, you don’t need to have as many to ensure that your genes get passed on to the next generation. Moreover, the fewer children you have, the more time and resources you will be able to “invest” in each of them.14
It may be, as Stearns speculates, that children had a greater need for parental attention precisely because they had fewer brothers and sisters to play with, and that this automatically increased the rivalry between them. (In the Dutch magazine De Vrouw, a parenting advice columnist named Nelleke Bakker remarked as early as 1899 that “bickering” was probably most fierce “in families with only two children, because the children are constantly forced to endure one another’s company.” A “third element,” she added, might serve as a lightning rod.15)
But above all, the growing attention on, and fear of, jealousy between siblings was part of a new understanding of parenting—one that had arisen in the wake of the demographic transition. Now that illness and premature death no longer formed the main source of parental worry, children’s psychological development and well-being became paramount. From then on, the reference book Vijf eeuwen opvoeden in Nederland (Five centuries of raising children in the Netherlands) informs me, parents wanted “to be able to give care and attention to each child individually.” This, too, was one of the reasons for the shrinking family: ample care and attention “are more easily given when there are only a small number” of children.16
Parents thus suddenly found themselves responsible for the inner lives of their offspring. And for advice on the matter, they went for the first time not only to grandmom or grandad or the neighbors, but also to a relatively new figure in the child-rearing world: the independent expert. A new group of professionals—pediatricians, child psychologists, and developmental psychologists—possessed knowledge that parents lacked, or thought they lacked.
On the ways in which parents were to combat jealousy, these experts were unanimous. Their methods don’t differ all that much from the advice I’m offered today by parenting websites, forums, and guidebooks—this collection of incantations that I can now reproduce without effort:
Acknowledge that the first child doesn’t have to be outright enthusiastic about the impending upheaval.
Tell grandmoms, grandads, and other visitors soon after the birth that they should pay particular attention to the eldest.
And if the first child still exhibits jealousy when the second child is born, don’t punish them for it—extinguish the emotion with all the love and understanding you can muster.17
Copyright © 2020 by Lynn Berger