The first thing that you need to do is to include your older siblings in the bonding process with any new siblings. What this means is that if you have a newborn in the house, the newborn is most likely going to be getting all of the attention, which can cause resentment in the older children. Before you bring the newborn home, you should explain to the older children about what will be happening, plus how things might change with a baby in the house. You also need to reassure them that even if things do change that doesn't mean that you love them any less. What you should also do is to include the older children in the care of the newborn, whether they hand you a washcloth or you read them a story during feeding time. This will help to stem the jealousy feelings and create a bond with the younger sibling.

Something else that you are going to want to do to help form tighter bonds between your children is to make sure that you treat all of them the same. This can be rather hard to mange because different kids will perceive things differently. What you need to keep in mind is that the older children are going to have different privileges than the younger children, this isn't treating them differently it is normal rules in parenting. What you need to do is not show favoritism over one child or another, meaning when it comes time to doing chores all children should be required to help. Not to mention that the same rules should be set for all children and those rules should be enforced equally; punishments might be different based on the age of the child.

Another thing that you can do to help encourage your children to bond is to encourage your children to play together rather than separately. Just be aware of the fact that playing together can cause fighting among children because they will be fighting over what they are playing with, this type of fighting is considered normal, and you should not intervene unless somebody is getting physically hurt. By not interfering with their fighting, you are going to be teaching them the skills to work things out on their own. In addition to playing together, you are also going to need to encourage family time. Make family time a specific night of the wee, the time spent together should be the entire evening, but can be less depending on what is going on. Try planning family night on an evening where nothing else is going on that way you can spend quality time together, which helps promote closeness.

While spending time together is great, you are also going to need t teach your children when to leave the other children alone. All too often siblings don't see the signs that the other children are sending that say "I want to be left alone" which causes even more friction and can cause resentment. As a parent, you need to help teach the younger children that they don't always have to play or do things with the older children and that sometimes the older children need time to themselves. This will help your older children feel better about the younger children because they won't have that resentful feeling that they always have to watch the other kids or take them along.