Why Do I Feel Guilty For Being a Better Parent To My Second Child?
Last Monday morning, I stood at the kitchen counter trimming crusts off my 7-year-old’s whole wheat sandwich when my 10-year-old leaned against the fridge and said, “You never cut my crusts off.”
I froze mid-whack of the serrated knife, crumbs falling onto the gray granite. I laughed it off at first, said, “You never asked,” but even as I said it, I knew that was a lie. When she was 7, I was still working 45 hours a week, juggling daycare drop-offs and last-minute project deadlines and trying to remember to buy more laundry detergent before we ran out. I was just happy if I got everyone out the door with a lunch and matching socks. I never had the extra 90 seconds to trim crusts.
With the second kid, I work part-time from home, I’ve already stopped panicking over every tiny sniffle, and I have enough bandwidth to remember he only likes his grapes cut in half, that his socks have to be the striped ones, that he needs a spare pair of pants in his backpack even though he hasn’t had an accident in two years. I show up to every one of his soccer practices. I rock him when he scrapes his knee instead of telling him to walk it off. I read three bedtime stories instead of one. It’s not that I’m trying to be better. I just am better, in all these small, visible ways. And that leaves a constant, low hum of guilt under almost everything I do.
A week after the crust comment, I met my older sister, who has two teenagers, for coffee. She stirred her oat latte and told me she still feels the same thing, 15 years later. She was a single mom working nights when her oldest was small, and she barely remembers most of his first year. By the time her second came along, she had a steady job and a partner and time to bake birthday cookies for his class. She still apologizes to her oldest sometimes, and he just rolls his eyes and tells her he has better memories of getting fast food every night after her shift than he would have of homemade cookies anyway.
That conversation stuck with me. I’d been spiraling for weeks, thinking I was damaging my oldest, that she’d grow up resenting her brother because I gave him all the soft, easy parts of me that I was too stretched thin to give her. I’d read a dozen forum posts where other parents talked about first-born hardship from unequal parenting, and it felt like I was living exactly that. But after talking to my sister, I tried something small, instead of just sitting with the guilt. That night, after my second fell asleep, I sat down on my oldest’s bed and asked her a straight question: “I do a lot of things different with your brother than I did with you when you were his age. Is there any small thing you wish I’d do more of, or do for you that I do for him?”
She didn’t say a trip to the water park or a new video game. She thought for a minute, then said, “I wish you’d sit with me while I do my homework. You just tell me to do it at the table, but you sit next to brother when he reads every night.” That was it. It was such a small thing, I hadn’t even noticed I was doing it.
Now I carve out 15 minutes every weeknight to sit next to her on the couch while she works. I don’t hover or help unless she asks. I just bring my laptop and answer emails while she does her math, and sometimes we talk about her friends or what’s going on at school. I also started doing a 20-minute “only us” stop after school every other Wednesday. We pull into the dollar store parking lot, she picks out any candy she wants, we get a large soda to split, and we just sit and talk. No brother, no phones, no errands to run. It’s tiny, it doesn’t cost more than five dollars, but it’s hers.
I also stopped over-apologizing. When she points out another difference—“You let brother pick the movie last night,” “You helped him build his Lego set but you made me do mine by myself”—I don’t spiral into a 10-minute speech about how sorry I am. I just say, “You’re right, that wasn’t fair. What can we do to fix that this time?” Or if it’s just a difference of when they were little, I say, “That’s true, when I had you I was still figuring out how to be a mom. That sounds like that would feel unfair, doesn’t it?” That’s it. I don’t put her in the position of having to comfort me over my own guilt.
I used to think fair meant doing everything exactly the same for both kids. But fair isn’t identical. My oldest got three whole years of all of me, before her brother was even born. She got my frantic, overexcited first-time mom energy, the endless photo albums and the daily baby journal that I stopped keeping after two months with the second. She got to be the only one who got to teach me how to be a parent. That’s a gift the second will never have, just like the second gets the calmer, more sure of me that the first never got.
I still feel the guilt, sometimes. Last week I missed my oldest’s cross country meet because I had to take the second to an emergency dentist appointment for a chipped tooth, and I sat in the waiting room feeling that familiar twist in my chest. But now I don’t let it take over the whole day. After I picked the oldest up from practice, I stopped and got her favorite chocolate milkshake, and I sat and listened to her tell me about how she got third place, and how she tripped over a root but got back up and kept running.
It’s not perfect. There will be more times I mess up, more times I prioritize the second because he’s smaller and needs more help, more times I feel that guilt creep in. But it doesn’t hang over me like it used to. Most days, the 20 minutes in the parking lot and the 15 minutes on the couch are enough.
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