Nate is 7 months old, and needs to be held regularly. Lily is a few days past 2 1/2 and gets very jealous when this happens. She also gets jealous when he's changed, tickled or given attention of any kind.
A two year old's expression of jealousy doesn't always come out clearly. We've learned that sometimes it can be directed at the younger sibling and other times it can come out as a disobedient call for attention - standing on chairs, etc. Often the jealousy comes out up front and honestly, like the other day when I was tickling Nate and she asked to be in the middle. The most recent incarnation is pouting - she'll walk out of the room with her face down.
We've tried a few different tactics dealing with this, and achieved middling to no success. Timeout's tend to make a bad situation worse and appear to do little to prevent future occurrences. Negative response, as in rewarding Nate when Lily acts up, only works until she does something that must have a response.
What works is the empathic response - acknowledging the reason for Lily's behavior, then warmly comforting her and offering a better solution for the next time jealousy comes up. This works very well. The only problem is that you don't always have both parents on hand, and it's not easy to pull off alone.
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