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Home › Articles › Family Life › Welcome, Babies!

Welcome, Babies!

Preparing Siblings for the Arrival of Twins

By Amy Carey

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When you're expecting a baby, everyone in the family must adjust their lives – a lot. Siblings of the baby-to-be, particularly young children, may not understand the concept that soon another person will be vying for Mom and Dad's attention – and usually getting it, for the first few months at least. So parents spend the months before the baby is born reading books about new arrivals, talking about how life will be different for the family and enlisting the help of older children in picking out baby gear or setting up the nursery.

Things get a little more complicated, though, when your older child sees you assembling multiple cribs instead of one. Or overloading your dresser drawers with double the sleepers, booties and diapers. If you're pregnant with multiples, you might not know how to prepare your older children for the addition of more than one new person to the family.

Preparation During Pregnancy
First, you can start introducing your child to the concept of new siblings with books like Hello, Baby by Lizzy Rockwell (Dragonfly, 2000). Talk about what it will mean to have babies around the house – the crying, the nearly constant feedings – then explain that your family is lucky enough to be expecting multiple blessings.

When Jeanie Kesselring of Union City, Pa., learned at 20 weeks that she was carrying twin boys, her son, Austin, was already excited about the new arrival. "We had been doing the usual things like telling him how he was going to have the really important job of being a big brother and taking him to doctor appointments so he could hear the heartbeat," she says. "When we found out about having twins, we told him he was really lucky because most kids only get one new baby and he was getting two."

To make sure her son was adjusting to the idea of having two baby brothers, Kesselring bought three dolls: a larger one to represent Austin and two smaller "babies" to represent the twins. "We used the dolls to help Austin understand how small the new babies would be and how we would get the babies dressed, changed and fed," she says.

Elizabeth Lyons, an author who writes about parenting and twins, also bought a pair of baby dolls for her daughter, who was younger than 2 years old when her twin siblings were born. "I think the way in which you prepare a child for the birth of twin siblings depends on the older child's age and interest," Lyons says. "The parents can best gauge the child's enthusiasm for, or apprehension about, new babies and respond the best way they can through talking, sibling classes and getting the older child involved by letting him or her pick out clothes [or other items] for the babies."

If your child is old enough to attend appointments with your doctor, particularly appointments where you will receive a sonogram, actually seeing the babies "in person" can help him grasp the concept of twins. Remember to bring home a picture from the sonogram for younger children to see. Then add a few twin-oriented books to your reading material, such as Twin to Twin

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