Birth Order and Temperament: When Child Number 2 Is Enough For 1 and 2 Combined

Mornings in our house go something like this. The baby, now 19 months, wakes up. It's probably 6:15. I no longer need a clock. She has words. She says, "Daddy. Daddy! Daddy? Daddy! Mama? Daddy!" She tests out her pacifiers, I can hear her popping them in and out, and claps them on the crib rail, saying Daddy through the pacifier. The requested gets up. He gets her out, she takes her blankie with her, and they go down to make breakfast. He used to try and keep her pacifier in until they got downstairs. (She shouts her sister's name as they cross the landing.) Then we realized it didn't matter. I sleep in until 7, but sleeping in means listening to the child have her breakfast. It's relaxing, but it is not sleeping. She is so loud. Before she had words, she would shout, scream, or grunt. Now she has words but also does a lot of delighted growling. It sounds like "Hah!" but as a growl, husky and loud. Some of the things she says at breakfast are "Whoa," "Klaus!" (cat), "Uh-oh," "Whoa!" Also, "Go," "Again," "Cracker," "Cookie," and "Cheese." Lately, I've found myself getting nervous when I feed this child, because I'll walk away and wonder why it's so quiet, only to remember that it's quiet because she is busy eating.

You learn a lot when you add a child to the household. For me, a lot of it has to do with the immediate acceptance and then slow realization that temperament is real. Personality is an inherited trait. If you told me that my first child resembled her future self at 2 weeks, I would have laughed in your face and handed her back. But when our second was born, the pediatrician in the hospital said something about temperament being "visible" at 2 weeks, and I believed her. She nursed differently, she sat in my arms differently, she slept and breathed differently.

I don't know why it's so surprising for parents to see, almost immediately, that their second, or third, or fourth child is different. It should be fairly obvious that as adults, you and your partner, you and your siblings, are not the same. But the reality of caring for your first, given how hard you work at it, does lead you astray. I think it has to do with the fact that no one is a parent or has many parent-like skills until you are a parent. That divide, crossing that line from naive to responsible, causes a lot of quick decision-making and judgment forming. All you know is your normal. When you only have one child, it is easy to stupidly not grasp how other people's babies differ. You only know your baby, and your baby is your 24/7, a reality so encompassing that it's tough to see how someone else's child just never sleeps. Or won't nap. Or won't eat. Or always cries. Ad infinitum. Especially when we are all full of these merit-based books that applaud parents for properly shaping their tiny infant with "sleep training" and baby-led weaning, etc. Being novices, we cling to rules and "science." You think the things you see in your child are the things you've done as a quick study. You think, I made this. We did it. What you can't see is other parents' reality. Unless you start to spend a lot of time with parents and their kids. Watching toddlers is where the first-time parent starts to get a little wiser.

I still remember watching, in shock, as a mother at a birthday party instructed her toddler to turn the trike around on the path and come back. Which the toddler heard and promptly did. My child had never heeded a first warning. Nothing ever seemed to make her "stop." Sure, I admired the mother. But I continued to observe the kid and thought, "You must be a different species."

For some reason we thought our first daughter was loud. We thought she was talkative and relentlessly social. But the second one is that and more. She's by some measures more easygoing, but she takes Kid 1 to the next level. She lacks things like fear or anxiety, as if she's genuinely pleased by everything and with herself. She can entertain herself with toys, loves games, and engages easily with others. By shouting in their face and laughing. It's overwhelming if you're not prepared for it. She has more physical confidence than her older sister and is much less cautious, so when they wrestle or play around the couch, the older is likely to end up scared or bumped before the baby quits.

We routinely call her "crazy." Or, the "gremlin," given her noisemaking and the fact that she morphs into something wilder after 6 p.m. Yet I'm aware that if she were the first, she'd be our normal. Maybe we'd think whomever came second was crazy. I love it. There are many pleasures to having a different second kid, particularly when the second takes longer naps. But mostly it's the pleasure of seeing the same growth through a different lens.

Being the early riser in the family, she rules the morning. She does laps around the kitchen while the oatmeal cooks. She dances. She wants you to dance with her. And she shouts up the house. After her first exam in the hospital nursery, a pediatrician said, "She's got great lungs." All newborns are loud, but she was a sort of loud that made your ears shut down if you were too close. We have never needed a monitor to hear her. When we drove around town in the early months and she began to cry at stoplights, my then 3-year-old would cry from the shock. Now, the baby knows how to use volume for the effect that it has on her sister — she cries or shouts in the car, and her (extremely noise-sensitive) big sister cowers and falls apart. "Stop! She's too loud." Which makes her shout more. It's a game only a toddler can play.

When I found out we were having another girl, I worried. Not for any reason other than I was pregnant and worried. I worried that they wouldn't be compatible. I knew that some sisters recall their relationship while young as being intense or competitive. Some adult sisters seem scarred by those tough years. Sisters are supposed to be "close." I don't know why this seems different from having two boys. I only knew that if we weren't going to have any more kids, there might be more pressure on them to have a "close" relationship. And what if they weren't compatible?

The actual arrival of the second child makes this worry seem, well, pointless. You see temperament and what seem like these vast differences in orientation and behavior. You see them as individuals, who terrorize each other, and then you see them as siblings, who share the same space constantly, and you see them get along. Some of it is effortless, and some of it is figured out. All quite human.