It amazes me how two sisters can be so different

A DAD'S LIFE: Children develop in their own way – and in their own time

A DAD'S LIFE:Children develop in their own way – and in their own time

I HAVE TWO very different children. Not different as in they have a couple of heads each or they’re telekinetic, they just differ from each other. Physically, one is spat out of me, the other a ringer for her mother. But that’s not the main thing, they dupe me over and over by approaching things like creatures from different planets.

The first one comes up and does things in a certain way. Like most eldest kids, she wants approval, she wants to impress. She's always been all mine: my colouring, my skin, my habits. Poor kid, as a baby she hung out with a smelly, hairy man. She dozed off for her afternoon naps in front of Top Gear. She is impressed by an ability to burp the alphabet.

If I am her guiding light, she is my yardstick for children. I presume they will all operate within the parameters she has moved between. Obviously, other kids have entered the house in recent years with strange attitudes and habits, but I could dismiss them out of hand as deviants. Boys in particular confuse me. All that barging round and shouting. Simmer down lads, simmer down elsewhere.

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I can acknowledge difference and, to a point, celebrate it. Not everybody can be like me – their cross to bear. Where the confusion arises is in the next child pootling along, not so much on a different path as encased within a different flotation device.

Where her sister was all talk and “look at me!”, the younger is stolid in her appraisal of people and the world from behind an impenetrable wall of solemnity. I have written about her on numerous occasions, about her quietness, her refusal to perform for anyone, her insistence on doing everything on her terms and her speed. I worried about this because it looked like it could cause her problems.

They were adult concerns, and mainly about other adults. The only people who comment or find difficulty in a child being reticent are adults, and not many adults at that. The fear was my own parental overprotectiveness coming to the fore. Other kids, her classmates in particular, saw her quietness as her thing. That’s what she did, they accepted it, and barrelled along with it.

At no point was she ever slighted or excluded due to her shyness, in fact, in some ways she was celebrated by her classmates for it. Kids would clamour to hang with her; she developed a certain enigmatic quality in her quietness. At all of six years of age.

This didn’t stop me checking out the possibilities. Wondering at psychological reasons and future implications for her considered carefulness in moving through the world. I have researched many just because the one thing it certainly signifies is that she finds it hard to mix.

But then whatever I came up with, I shelved. She finds mixing hard; so what? She does it in her own time, leave her at it. It was difficult not to push her, to insist she play the game, and sometimes she can appear rude, but she’s small and doesn’t need extra pressure as she comes to terms with the way things work.

Now there is a sort of emergence. Where before I was aware of her strength, mainly in her ability to defy people in playing the “impress me” game, I am seeing in recent times a strut in her step. She will never sprint into a crowd of kids and jump up and down in pleasure at their company, but suddenly there is a little swagger in her roll as she plays with her peeps.

There is a certainty there, a belief rising to the surface that she is valued and has a role in every group. She always had this within the family and was able to show it, but withdrew once in public. For the first time, the outside world is getting a blast of the full force of her personality as she becomes comfortable about revealing herself.

This is all new to me. With her sister, I have to calm and quell so she doesn’t take off into the ether in occasional hyperactivity. For this one, I have to trust: trust that there’s no need for me to constantly poke, prod and force the issue; and trust her that she knows what she’s doing at some unconscious level.

She does. She knows better than me. And the beauty of a personality coming to the fore slowly is that it reveals itself incrementally, inching along, becoming herself in surprising ways. I was kidding myself thinking she was afraid, she’s just been biding her time.