The Child's Jealousy of the New Baby

This is a problem sent in to us by a mother, who says:
I have a little girl of two, and I am about to have a second child. What I fear most is that deadly jealousy which has begun to show itself in the behavior of my daughter Salwa, even before the second child's arrival. What is the way to guard against it?

A child's jealousy of the new baby is a natural thing; but modern education can turn aside its harm and put out its fire with a measure of wisdom, which mother and family together must take up. And here is what a mother like you did about it:

Two weeks before the date of her confinement, she bought her two-year-old girl a beautiful doll, and set about teaching her, every day, how to wash the doll, change its clothes, and care for it as her own daughter. The feeling of motherhood quickened in the little one's breast — so much so that, after the new baby's arrival, it was not hard for each of the two mothers to devote herself to the affairs of her own child... It is a practical method; it may not succeed, but it deserves a trial... The important thing is that the child's feelings be answered, so that she senses no emptiness after the baby's coming, and no sense that someone has taken her place. The family often wounds the child when, by their remarks, they intimate to the child that first importance in the house and first place in the mother's heart are no longer hers. Remarks like these do grave harm in the souls of the young and provoke a violent reaction; and it is well to warn the family and visitors to avoid them, and to refrain likewise from any comparison between the two children, above all one in the younger's favor.

I know a wise mother who, when she had her second child and the presents came pouring in for him, would offer her elder child, every time he visited her at the hospital, sweet presents as though they came from his little brother. And so this mother knew how to plant in her son's heart the love that leaves no room for jealousy.