Will the daughter feel bad about being excluded?

There are some places you can’t bring your toddlers because they’re too hyperactive. It might take years for your family to be ready to go to a sit-down restaurant after your baby is born, because you don’t trust that your baby or toddler will be able to sit in an Applebee’s for an hour and a half without screaming her head off. A meltdown is not only emotionally distressing for the parents of the child; it also disturbs everyone around them and makes it difficult to have a relaxing meal. 

Let’s say your 7-year-old daughter is in the school play, and you’re debating whether you should bring her 3-year-old brother to the performance. The best-case scenario is that he sits through the performance silently, laughing at the jokes and clapping at all of the appropriate moments. A middle-of-the-road result might include him sitting in the hallway with dad playing on his iPad for the second half of the performance because he started to get noisy. At worst, he starts screaming and hollering the second his sister says her first line, taking all of the attention away from her on her special day.

Sometimes, you have to exclude one of your children for the other child’s sake. That exclusion might hurt the child’s feelings, but if they’re young enough, they might not even know they’ve been left out. The little girl in this story will probably have no idea that her brother saw the Easter Bunny without her.