For those of you who have had children, what would be your optimal age spacing?
For instance, let’s say you have three kids all spaced 1 year apart. But after having children you feel it would’ve been better to have the first one, then wait two years then have the second one then wait five years and have another one.
Or maybe you feel it would’ve been better to have triplets and get it all over at once
You get the idea?
I know there are a ton of psychological theories about optimal age space for siblings and the effects on them, but I was wondering from a PARENT’S VIEWPOINT, what do you feel would have been ideal for you.
I know for me there was an age gap of ten years between me and my next brother and 12 years between me and my sister and 16 years for me and my oldest brother.
I felt this worked out pretty good for me as a kid. Having an older parent wasn’t so good when I was little but it was great by the time I became a teenager.
But as I said, I was interested from a PARENT’S VIEWPOINT, not the children’s point of view.
We did five years, so the first would get out of college and we’d have a year to recover before we had to pay for the next one. It worked out very well. They also were far enough apart to not have the same friends and close enough to play together.
My brother and I were born 19 months apart, a bit close.
My kids are 13 years apart. It’s a bit too much, honestly. In one sense, it’s great, in that we’ve got another “adult” (the boy turns 18 next week, the girl is 5) to help with her - not just the “built in babysitter,” but things like getting up from the table to pour her some milk, reach something off a shelf too high for her, etc. The neverending servitude that goes on day to day with a little one.
On the other hand, I’m looking at him old enough to move out (or at least live with us as a roommate, not a child) and looking at her and realizing there’s another 13 years of this ahead of me. Ugh. I’m tired. 31 years is a long time to be actively parenting without a break.
And I only have two. My SO is the eldest of 12, with more than 20 years between the eldest and youngest (they’re all about 2 years apart, on average). I don’t know how his mother did it.
If I were to do it again, I’d time them about three to five years apart. Far enough to have some good foundational time as the only baby, close enough that kid raisin’ is done with much sooner.
My kids are thirteen months apart. I would have preferred a little more space between them ( 18 months or two years) but not much more. There were certain advantages to having them that close together- once the bottle, diaper, car seat etc stages ended I never had to go back to them.
I avoided the disadvantages I've seen with kids spaced very far apart- my brother's kids are currently 22, 16 and 11. With that range of age differences it was difficult and sometimes impossible to find a vacation/day trip suitable for all three - when the youngest one was four, she might have wanted to go to a petting zoo, but the older two wouldn't have and the older two might have wanted to go to a theme park that the four year old was too young for. My sister in law also had the everyday problem of "dangerous toys"- a toy that is perfectly safe for a six year old might be dangerous for a two year old sibling. Think Barbie shoes and tiny Lego pieces. I also avoided the temptation of the built in babysitter- although my siblings and I are spaced pretty closely ( four in four and a half years), I was old enough to watch the youngest when she was too young to be at home alone and my niece spent a lot of Friday and Saturday nights watching her two younger siblings. I did not want to be able to do that.
My original two are three years apart. I always thought that worked out just right.
My husband’s two are also three years apart. When we married, we ended up with four kids who were each 18 months apart. That was a little close - we had four teenagers at once.
Both my parents were married before and my siblings are 13, 15, & 19 years older than me respectively. I hated it. Basically I did not grow up with these people, I have the same relationship with them most people do with aunts or uncles. We aren’t close; I only see them at family gatherings and have zero interest in more. I did grow up with their children, my neices are more like cousins. Once of whom was almost a full year older than my and we were in the same grade at the same school.
The brother closest in age to me started college the same year I started kindergarden; my memories of living with him are extremely vauge. Family vacations and the like were always just me and my parents. They have a bunch of memories & experiances they shared. For all practical purposes I grew up an only child. Still it’s not like I regret being born and given my mother’s health issues I can’t begrudge them for not having another kid after me.
My first two were just about four years apart, intentionally. After the first one, I didn’t even think about another one for a couple of years, but then I started thinking “Hmmmm, when would it be good to have another baby?” and decided when my daughter was four would be good. She’d be much more independent than, say, a 2YO. She’d be able to comprehend the whole concept of a new baby, able to help out with the baby (fetching me a diaper, etc.) That’s the way we did it, and it worked out great!
Our third, and youngest, things were a bit different. For a long, long time we agreed that two children were plenty, thanks, and we wouldn’t have any more. The youngest was six before my husband said to me “Well, we could try one more time for a boy, couldn’t we?”
As a result, our youngest was born when our older two were 12 and 8, respectively. Now our ‘baby’ just turned 11, and our older two are out on their own. This is interesting.
Upside: I have more patience for dealing with a kid than I did when I was younger; we definitely have more money for dealing with a kid; our youngest nearly gets to enjoy the pampered lifestyle of an ‘only child’.
Downside: Youngest is not as close to her sisters as I would like; I’ll be in my mid-50s before she’s an adult; we’ll be paying for college for a long, long time yet.
Having said all this, if I’d known we were going to have a third, I do think I’d have elected to have her sooner. But all in all, I like the way things are now.
My daughter will turn three a few weeks before my baby is due - I’d rather have had them about two years apart than three. I was three when my brother was born, and have always felt that I was just old enough to remember life without him and just that bit too young to understand why he needed all that attention. Young enough not to remember life without the younger sibling, that’s what I would have aimed for if our situation had been different.
Check back with me in a couple of years and I’ll tell you if I was right.
Baby boy #2 is due in about 10 days. My first child is 6. Honestly, it took us over 5 years to decide to have another. My older son was VERY sensitive, needy, and clingy as a baby and toddler and the thought of adding another one literally didn’t cross my brain until he was about 4ish when things started to calm down. Plus I own my own business and needed to put several years of 16-18 hours days in to get things going and make sure it stayed stable enough to carry on. We had a very early miscarriage about a year ago and I was pregnant again with this one by May.
That’s just the way things worked out for us. I’m sure there will be pro’s and con’s but I can’t change it so I’ll accept and love it for what it is. As far as my son’s personality goes it was better for all of us to wait and have a bigger age gap.
I actually think the closer together, the better. They play together more, have more in common, can go to school together, and are in the same stage of development. If I had to do it again, I would space my children as close together as possible.
That’s mine almost exactly - 13 months apart. And yes. Once you get past the sleepless nights, diapers, and carseats, you are done (until grandchildren). And its really nice that now (11 and 12) I can drop both of them off at the ski slope and pick them up later, we can take vacations that interest them both. Even school is easy - this year one is in middle school the other in elementary - but usually conferences, etc. are done in one fell swoop at the same school.
I wouldn’t have planned it this way, and there are disadvantages - the first three years are somewhat of a zombiefied blur. They are a little too close and pick on each other more than kids separated by more years. I’ll have five years of college expenses for two all at once. (And am currently in braces time). But the ability to take them both to the petting zoo or both zip lining in Mexico because they are about the same age - that’s got a lot of value.
Quoted for truth My two are 16 months apart and if you survive the first 3 years the rest is smooth sailing. The worst for me was waiting for my daughters birth - I’d been pregant or breast feeding for over 2 years, I just wanted a piece of ME back for a few minutes. As a result I think I rushed her to a bottle at just over 6 weeks. I was also the sole breadwinner then however so that contributed as well.
We’re in the university years now and it was a little odd being an empty nester at 42, but it appears that changes again this summer as my daughter is planning to move home and commute to school from here. The kids did live together for 2 years but my son wants to try living alone when their lease runs out and after running the financial implications daughter has determined that her bedroom at home is looking awfully good
Middlebro and his wife had the kids 3 years apart, almost to the day; both pregnancies were very much planned (SiL was surprised when she got a hole-in-one the first time, then miffed when she didn’t the second, but still, the woman has absolutely no fertility problems). So apparently for them that was the ideal distance.
Advantages:
-If you’re on the older side (cough) when you start, you still have time for more than a couple before you get geriatric
-It’s a common spacing. The Smaller Girl, starting school this year, has a pre-made peer group of the siblings of her older sister’s classmates - many of whom she’s already familiar with. And I’m expecting to see the same thing again in 2 years time.
-Close enough to play together.
Disadvantages:
-The bit where you have a 4yo a 2yo and a newborn in the house at the same time. That was rough.
Mine are 13 months apart too. I saw the same advantages. It was also easy to gauge the behavioral changes in the younger one by considering what happened to the elder one year before. One minor disadvantage might have been the younger’s slower development of language skills. He continued to use ‘baby talk’ for a while with his older brother translating.
Mine are 3.5 years apart. In hindsight, I think it would’ve been easier to have them 18 months to 2 years apart, max. First, there’s the issue of my son remembering what it was like not to have her around - the first six months were really, really hard for him.
Second, as she becomes more mobile, now it’s all about the stuff. His desire to spend more time with me while his sister is around wars with his desire to protect his toys. And he’s started in with the, “Mom, overlydaughter is looking at me! Overlydaughter is trying to touch me!”
Third, his reaction to his sister sometimes provokes confrontations between him and my husband, who is protective of our youngest almost to a fault. So there’s distance in that relationship that I’m not sure would’ve been there had my son been young enough to discount his behavior as typical of a baby/young toddler. The thing is, my son has never, ever been violent toward the baby - when he knocks her down, it’s generally because he’s trying to get past her and not paying attention to what’s in his path. He’s never come close to hitting her, and he’s always very gentle. It’s just that my husband already has very high expectations of him, some of which are unreasonable and probably a result of culture as much as personality. Those expectations were even harder to meet when our son was not only dealing with new challenges at preschool, but having to figure out how to act at home. Things are at last getting easier, but for a while it was awful.
Finally, there are a few “incidentals” you don’t think about - just when you thought you were done with diapers, you’re suddenly back to dealing with them. Just when you got used to having more personal space, it’s gone. And just when you thought you were pushing past the tantrum phase, you’re going right back into it.
Anyway, I remind myself frequently that, had we not had them when we had them, we wouldn’t have the same kids we have now.
