A friend’s daughter has a 3-year-old girl. The kid is adorable, and she’s been the smallest child at all the gatherings for a while. Everybodywas alwaysadmiring and praising her because she’s really a very remarkable child.
And then today Klara appeared on the scene, and a 3-month-old always beats a 3-year-old in terms of cuteness. After observing everyone make a fuss about the baby and listening to the endless, “OMG, look at the huge saliva bubbles she’s making, she’s the cutest, OMG, what a precious baby!”, the 3-year-old got into the middle of the room and desperately made the hugest saliva bubble anybody has ever seen.
But nobody appreciated her enormous saliva bubble. Instead, she was told to mind her manners and to stop trying to mock the baby.
I never understood the sadness of the growing kids who suddenly get a lot less attention and can’t figure out the reason. But it can’t be easy for them to realize that they are not the cutest and the most adorable any longer. Let’s remember to notice older children and try to understand their sadness.
Clarissa's Blog 
Spoken like the eldest child. 🙂 I don’t remember being upstaged by my brother because he’s only a little more than a year younger than I am. I do remember endless annoyance at being told “He’s younger than you so you have to excuse [annoying behavior].”
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I think this is a common problem that results in jealousy between siblings that are 2-3 years apart in age. If the age gap is less, the older one doesn’t remember the transition (like the commentator above) and if the gap is more, the older one is capable of understanding why this has occured (I think you yourself once wrote a post on this, how your parents sat down with you when your sister was about to be born). But at 2-3 years of age, the older child just doesn’t get why he/she had to lose attention and often the sadness that you describe results in a long-term jealousy of the younger child.
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My jealousy of my younger brother did not start until much later. My mother clearly favored him and he got all these things because of being a boy: could come home late / did not have to call (this started in elementary school), got sports equipment, wasn’t required to do so much music, was allowed to use the car in high school, and on, and on. He also extorted money openly from my parents and it was considered OK — whereas I was always accused of conspiring to do so, although I hardly dreamed of it. Later when he became a house husband it was assumed I had to do the work of the family because he was working for his wife. And on, and on.
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There are so many ways to mess up the relationship between siblings but this is among the most insidious ones. It’s so wrong, just wrong. 😦
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He is also jealous of me, though. I was older, more social, had more friends, was more obviously multitalented, extroverted, and I was the one my mother bragged about … and was more efficient at school, had the powers of concentration to do PhD (he has 2 MAs and an MLIS but did not have that PhD cachet), etc., etc., it all comes down to, if you insist on all this competition and you put people down and criticize them all the time, you get this result. My mother spent much time in her last years crying about how my brother and I were barely speaking. I kept telling her that if she would stop gossiping to each of us about the other one, we would do better. This made her cry more and my father thought it mean, but it was true.
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Of course, absolutely. These rivalries are manufactured by parents and other adult relatives 100%.
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