What imagining a second spouse reveals about your child's jealousy

Picture your spouse putting an arm around you and saying, 'I love you so much, I've decided to bring home a second wife just like you.' Imagine strangers cooing over her while offering you a polite hello. Imagine your closet raided for her wardrobe because, well, you've put on a little weight. How do you feel?

Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish used exactly this exercise with parents in their workshops, asking them to sit for a moment in the position their child already occupies every day a sibling exists. Almost everyone who tried it admitted to something ugly: a hunger to see the newcomer humiliated, hurt, gotten rid of. Ordinarily civilized adults discovered a capacity for pettiness and vengeance they hadn't known was in them.

Then Faber and Mazlish asked the harder question: what would actually help? Not one person wanted logic. Nobody wanted to be told, 'don't be ridiculous, there's enough love for both of you.' What people wanted was simpler and stranger: to say every nasty, unfair thing about the intruder, out loud, without their spouse jumping in to defend her or shutting them down.

That desire is exactly what children need permission for, and rarely get. A mother in one workshop described her daughter Melissa, seven, who never talked about anything that bothered her. One evening the mother sat beside her and said quietly that it must be hard sometimes to share her room, her toys, even her mother, with her little sister. It was, the mother said, like a dam breaking. Melissa admitted she sometimes wished her sister dead. That night, checking on the girls, the mother found them asleep in one bed, arms around each other.

The pattern Faber and Mazlish kept finding was the opposite of what most parents expect. Insisting on good feelings between children produced bad feelings. Acknowledging the bad feelings, however ugly, opened the door to good ones, not by telling a child what to feel, but by putting words to what's already there, or letting a child show anger in a drawing or with a doll instead of with fists, or simply saying, when hitting starts, that people are not for hurting, and showing the child how to say it with words instead.

The next time one of your children erupts with something you'd rather not hear, resist the urge to correct the feeling and instead put it into words, saying something like 'you sound furious at your brother right now.' If your child can't yet say what's wrong, hand her a crayon or a piece of clay and invite her to show you instead of tell you. When you catch yourself wanting to say 'don't be ridiculous' or 'you don't really hate her,' stop, and ask what your child actually needs, which is usually just to know you heard them. Whenever anger turns into hitting or grabbing, step in immediately to stop the action while still naming the feeling behind it, so the feeling stays allowed even when the fist is not.