Author’s practical guidance
"You take the big one, I'll take the baby"
Source named in the book: adjustment to a new sibling (Volling) · Gottman
Splitting the children between two adults is the obvious solution to an impossible evening, and it works immediately.
Say this now
Between the adults:
“Let's swap tonight. I haven't done his bedtime in two weeks.”
Counting in weeks is what makes the drift visible. Nobody notices it in a single evening.
To the child:
“Tonight it's me. Same story, same order — I know how you do it.”
The reassurance is that nothing changes except the person. That is only true if you agreed the wording in advance.
Do this
- Swap the pairing on a fixed day each week, whether or not it is convenient.
- Agree the wording of the routines so either adult can run either one.
- Notice which parent has not been alone with which child recently.
- Let the less practiced adult do it badly rather than taking over.
- Keep the split for genuinely hard evenings, not as the default.
Avoid this
- Keeping the same pairing every evening because it runs smoothly.
- "Daddy does bedtime with you, mommy does the baby" as a standing rule.
- Letting each parent develop their own version of the same routine.
If it repeats
If a child refuses the other parent outright, swap in daylight first — a park, a shop — before attempting bedtime. The refusal is about practice, not about preference.
Why the book suggests this
Splitting the children between two adults is the obvious solution to an impossible evening, and it works immediately. The cost arrives later: done for months, it produces two pairs. Each child gets one parent, and the other parent becomes the one who belongs to their sibling.
It also removes exactly the thing this series is built on. If one adult handles bedtime for one child and the other adult handles bedtime for the other, two children are being raised with two different sets of words in the same house.
From this collection
Same Words: Two Children
45 prepared situations in this family area.