Life with two kids
This blogpost has been sitting in my drafts since early June, when my second child turned one. It’s now the start of September. I can’t think of a better metaphor for expressing what it’s like going from one kid to two.
The first thing to say is that parenting two kids is not twice as difficult as one – at least, not yet. It’s somewhere in the region of 1.5x the challenge – like playing a video game you already know, but on a higher difficulty setting. You know how to defeat all the bosses now, but some of them have gained additional power-ups. Oh, and you’re only allowed to play with one hand.
Having two kids will also make your time parenting just one of them feel like you’re playing that same video game on “god mode” – you mean I only need to pay attention to a single child? And there’s a reasonable possibility that this child will either take a multi-hour nap, or settle themselves into an independent activity so I can watch Netflix in peace?! This is too easy.
I think it helped that we left a fairly chunky gap between our kids: Ted turned 5 in April, and Robin turned 1 in June. I can’t imagine having two-under-two or anything like that: one of the (few) perks of “double trouble” is being able to ask the older kid to help out with the younger one: “Ted, quick, grab me that packet of wet wipes”. Sometimes he even does it!
Solo parenting is obviously harder with both kids: it’s a statistical impossibility for both of them to give you a break at the same time, so you have to adjust to basically zero downtime or escape until bedtime (or if you can find a way of streaming Bluey). I have no idea how single parents do it and they have all my unending respect and admiration.
When Robin was born, I made some possibly-naive predictions about what I thought parenting two kids would be like. I’ll go through them now and give myself a score out of 5 for how accurate each prediction was.
Prediction #1 – The early days will be a lot easier than last time
This one turned out to be pretty true. I’ve written about the miraculous homebirth we experienced with Robin, so the “second time around” wins by default because we didn’t have to visit a hospital or go to ICU due to weight loss and infections.
I do remember feeling the same pit-of-my-stomach dread on the second or third night after she was born, lying on the sofa with what felt like an oncoming anxiety attack – a sensation I’d never experienced before until Ted was born in 2019. It passed quickly, and turned out to be the only negative experience of the early days of Robin.
We didn’t need to order any random shit from Amazon (or when we did, it was usually with an air of detached bemusement, eg. “let’s give this a go”) and we had all the things we needed. When we didn’t, we just… got on with it; improvised.
Score: 5 / 5
Note: When I showed a draft of this blogpost to Maddy, she heavily disagreed with my assessment of how much “easier” the early days were with Robin – given that I didn’t have to deliver or feed a baby, my perception of how things went is limited in scope.
Prediction #2 – We’ll start living our values a bit more, environmentally
When I wrote this prediction, I was mainly referring to driving: I’d lazily fallen back to taking Ted to nursery in the car and was feeling the stress and frustration of Birmingham’s roads eight times per week. I vowed last year not to be in this position again.
“Double trouble” has made the commute decision for us: I mainly work from home, and now Ted’s at school just across the road from us, then it falls to me to drop him off. Maddy works right by Robin’s nursery, so she takes her in the mornings – on the train. I occasionally step in with the car when we’re late or the weather sucks, but I’m spending way less time in the car.
I also hired a family cargo bike for these trips and successfully transported both kids to/from their daily dropoffs on it over the last months of summer, which I’m very pleased with.
Score: 4 / 5
Prediction #3 – We’ll be more relaxed about everything
Parenting two kids is still hard – the main difference is that you’ve been through it all before and don’t need to readjust your entire social life or sleep pattern: those things are already destroyed. This means that “second child syndrome” kicks in and you’re automatically less likely to freak out about your new kid: you know that the daunting cough they’ve picked up will disappear in a few days. You know that when they bang their lip on the door, they’ll be alright in ten minutes. And in any case, you don’t have time to helicopter parent, because your older kid is yelling at you to come and sit on the whoopee cushion they’ve inexpertly hidden under your chair.
We stopped using a baby monitor with Robin pretty early on and it still surprises me sometimes when I see other parents using them for much older kids – free yourself from the tyranny of always-on parenting! I’m sure there’s a good safety reason for these things when the child is an infant, but you almost certainly don’t need to be aware of every cough, yelp and roll once the child’s walking.
Robin is already a huge character and, like her brother, worryingly bold and confident. I’m sure this is related to our second-time parenting style: she follows what her big brother is doing and I think she’s all the better for it.
Score: 5 / 5
Prediction #4 – We’ll need to book in time to be a couple
Oh my, yes. Not that we were rolling in free time when we only had one child, but having another one “resets the clock”, as my friend (and father-of-three) Rich explained to me before I had kids. You really don’t get much time to yourself as an individual, never mind as a couple.
When you sit down in the evening after you’ve managed to get both kids down to sleep, finished tidying the house, done whatever life admin you’ve been putting off, and removed the whoopee cushion from your chair, you probably just want to veg out and doomscroll, or watch whatever newly-hyped Netflix show is staring back at you from the TV. But this does your relationship a disservice: you need to nurture it just like anything else.
It’s hard: your energy is low, you haven’t had a minute to yourself since your last toilet trip (and even that’s not a given) and there’s someone else’s snot in your hair. We’ve had to learn to be explicit (ooh-er) about our couple time and rare date nights, booking them in and being clear about making time and space for them. We don’t always nail this but I’ve appreciated how much more important it is second time around, because you have even less time than before to do this stuff.
Score: 5 / 5
Well, turns out I smashed all the predictions: pretty neat, right? But there were also a bunch of things I didn’t anticipate, too – so in the interests of balance, here’s a brief list of the things I didn’t predict would change when we went from one kid to two:
- Being grossed out by baby food and mealtimes the second time around, despite years of prior experience
- Having to build an entire new room for myself in the garden shed because of all the additional space a tiny baby would take up
- Learning all over again how to fold and unfold a pushchair, which I assumed was ingrained in my muscle memory forever
- Discovering how much love I was capable of feeling for a new human being in addition to the love I had for my first kid
Finally, I asked some friends for their questions or concerns about what the transition from one to two kids was like – here’s my thoughts on their queries:
Kerry: Maintaining any social life that doesn’t revolve around work or volunteering
This is hard – whenever one of us wants to do something in the evenings/weekends, we have to negotiate it with the other one. “Can I go to the pub with the guys tonight?” is always approved by Maddy, but I know I need to make sure she gets some equivalent bit of freedom – without it becoming a competition or league table. I suspect this one will continue to be tricky until both kids are at least school age, and therefore a little easier for things like dinner/bedtime routines.
Rachel: First kid regressions!
Oof, yeah. I’d forgotten about this – but the health visitor warned us that the first 12 weeks would likely see some regression from Ted, and they did indeed: nothing towards the new baby, but lots of anger/frustration with us, which we interpreted as attention seeking. It dropped off quickly, and it helped that he started school a few months after Robin was born, so all the attention naturally gravitated back to him again. It’s common, but not something that was a massive issue for us. We just focused on emphasising that he was a huge part of the baby’s life, and that she loved him – getting him to sit and read/speak to her helped him re-assert his place in the family. We also made sure to spend time together as a three, so he still got to feel like things were the same as before the baby arrived – even just a brief cuddle or story at bedtime once the baby was asleep.
Judy: The differences doing it the first time vs second time. How much do you think is nature vs nurture?
This is a tough one – I think it’s easy to see how influenced Robin is by Ted, whereas he had to forge his own identity. One thing I noticed in myself is how capable Robin is of understanding our speech, and communicating back to us, even as a 12-month old. I’m not claiming my toddler is a child prodigy: I think I’m saying that as a parent, I’m now more aware of how proto-speech sounds, and how to interpret a child’s understanding of things. When Ted was this age, I don’t think I’d developed those senses, so didn’t appreciate the subtleties of the way he’d move his head or hands, or the sounds he’d make which may have sounded like “baby noises” but were actually expressions or requests.
Zoe: Have you compared their milestones? And have they been vastly different?
Only in a very high-level sense, eg. Ted started walking at 11 months, Robin at 12. We used an app called the “Wonder Weeks” with Ted which told us, week-by-week, what sensory development he was currently experiencing. We installed it again when Robin was born but barely used it: I think mainly because of the points above about limited time/more “relaxed” parenting. But in general I don’t think we’ve compared them much: it doesn’t feel worthwhile, if that makes sense.
Dan: Balancing your attention equally between the two
This is hard while the age gap is where it is: both kids are demanding of our attention, but in completely different ways. A toddler’s needs are more immediate, and a five-year-old can be (almost) reasoned with. But it’s definitely a challenge, particularly when it’s just one adult with both kids. The best solution we’ve found for this is choosing an activity both kids can participate in, even if the youngest is really just simulating things – that way nobody’s feeling left out, and we can even rope Ted into looking after Robin while we make a coffee: the parenting dream, I think.
So – two kids: worth it? Of course it is. Parenting is the most chaotic, expensive, stressful and challenging thing I’ve ever done. Why would you want to make it more difficult?! Well, because amid all the chores, mess, noise, anxiety and tiredness, you might just find that your capacity for love has increased, too.