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"I already feel sorry for my second child and she's not even a year old."

I have a confession to make.

I am guilty of second child neglect.

While I was pregnant with daughter, I daydreamed about the kind of mother I would become as I moved from one child to two.

I swore blind I would do everything I could to make sure I would treat both my children as equally as possible. I would be making sure there were photos of the baby on her own (not just with her brother).

The baby would have a perfect baby book, just like her older brother. (Okay, confession, I didn’t even do a proper baby book for him. Worst. Mother. Ever.)

Both children would have equal one-on-one time with us.

We would read to both of them every night.

Yeah… right.

I started reading to my son at bedtime when he was just weeks old. I built it into his bedtime routine, like many of us do. We would sit together in his bedroom and I would point out the animals in his board books, make roaring noises for lions and say “fishy fishy fishy” pointing to the fish in the river.

He’s four and a half now, and to this day he expects, nay demands, that either his father or I read him a story every single night.

My daughter is nearly one, and I can probably count on my 10 fingers the number of times I have read her a bedtime story in her entire life.

I cannot shake the feeling that I have set my eldest up with the best foundation to develop his future literacy skills and a lifelong love of books, while I’m leaving my youngest behind to languish.

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The Guardian is reporting another study into the importance of reading to kids to enhance their development and learning. They quote Frank Cottrell Boyce, a children’s fiction author from Britain. “The joy of a bedtime story is the key to developing a love of reading in children,” he said, more so than literacy classes in school which can be “a very negative experience” for children he meets during visits to schools, whose first experience of books is in the classroom.

Study after study after study. Reading aloud to your young children is the best possible thing you can do to help them get the best start in their learning lives.

Every once in a while, my husband and I tell each other that it’s well past time we introduced books into the baby’s bedtime routine. We stare into each other’s tired eyes in the middle of this conversation, a silent acknowledgement that neither of us have the mental energy to add yet another task to the two-child-dinner-bath-bed marathon we run every night.

We keep saying, “Yes. We really should. Let’s start on Monday.” (Yes, reading to our baby daughter has become the equivalent of starting a diet.)

The only thing is, we’re starting to run out of Mondays.

Next Monday. I swear.

How did you manage with your second child?

This post was first published on The Motherish.