Learning about personal space is a hard lesson for my affectionate son

My son is extremely, perhaps miraculously, affectionate toward his sister. We avoided the landmines of sibling rivalry and brotherly contempt we’d seen in so many of our friends’ second or third kids – primarily, we think, because the four-year age gap between them negated any sense that he was in direct competition with this cute little pet we’d just ordered. He immediately embraced his baby sister as a novelty; a sometimes loud, smelly doll that captivated him and, better yet, earned him brownie points any time he was nice to it.

Within days of her being born, he was telling everyone she was ‘his’ baby, and would make a grand performance of fetching her things and patting her on the head. Though we largely took this to be performative, it became clear that his affection was in earnest when he started waking her in the night to stroke her face and ‘make sure she was all right’.

Within days of her being born, he was telling everyone we knew that she was ‘his’ baby

Two years on, he’s still affectionate at six, but her own responses as a toddler have become more mixed. She rejects any hug he gives her and pushes at his legs when he sits too close. He’s hurt by this, which we find hard. Much of parenting, I now realise, is spent recognising your own neuroses as they stare back at you, half-formed, or attempting to resist the urge to ‘fix’ them for your own child, as if you’ve been granted a time machine.

We try to tell him about personal space and remind him that some people don’t want to be hugged all the time. You should ask, we say. But this advice seems ill-suited for those times he does nothing more than walk into a room, prompting her to cross the entire floor on her doughy little legs so she can stick out a gummy hand and push him away. It’s hard, after all, to preach personal space when she goes out of her way to get him out of her way.

Most of the time, we’re able to brush it off as a joke, another reflection of her, shall we say, aloof demeanour. Her resting toddler face is a stiff-lipped glower, her cheeks puffed out with studied contempt. My son has an altogether sunnier disposition. He and I are affectionate animals. Dogs, not cats.

I’ve often presumed my own need for affection is rooted in growing up as one of 11 children in an attention-starved single-parent household, wrapped up in maternal bereavement and all that other cheery stuff you love to read about in this gently humorous weekly column. Now, however, I’m not so sure, since none of that applies to him, so maybe we’re just like that. Or perhaps I’ve just passed my own emotional faults down to him and stuck him with all my stupid baggage as a freebie.

In the end, I can’t change the way he feels about this any more than I can turn her from a cat to a dog, nor should I want to. So, when my son seems hurt, I just tell him she’ll probably come round in the end. ‘When?’ he asks. Oh, for a time machine.

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