There’s a thing SEND parents do that I don’t think gets talked about enough.

It happens quietly, usually at the end of a long day that was already complicated, and it looks like this: you are sitting with your other child — the one who doesn’t have the complex needs — and you are doing something normal. Reading a book. Watching something on TV. Kicking a ball around. Something easy and ordinary and completely without agenda.

But it isn’t easy and ordinary. You are doing it with the specific, slightly desperate intention of making sure they know they are seen.

Because siblings of children with complex needs grow up doing a lot of not-being-the-priority. Not because you love them less. Because some days the needs of one child are simply enormous, and the logistics are real, and there are only so many hours and one of you.

And they understand this, mostly. More than you’d expect, and sometimes more than you want them to.

What they actually do

Siblings adapt in ways that will undo you if you think about them too directly.

They learn to read the room. To know when it’s not a good time. To adjust their own needs — not because they’re told to, but because they’ve absorbed the household’s rhythms.

They advocate. They explain to their friends why certain things are different. They defend, quietly and without drama, their sibling.

They get less birthday party bandwidth. Less spontaneous “let’s go do something” energy. Less of the kind of parenting that requires your full, undivided, calm attention — because that resource gets spent elsewhere, and they know it.

They also, occasionally, have a complete meltdown about something that is on the surface completely trivial. And if you’re paying attention, you understand that the trivial thing is not the thing. You give them the thing. You don’t explain. You just give them the extra ten minutes, or the specific cereal, or the choosing of the film. Because they are asking for something real, and the specific form the request is taking is beside the point.

The guilt

I’ll say this plainly: the guilt about the sibling is one of the specific flavours of SEND parenting guilt that catches you at odd moments and is difficult to argue down.

Because you know you’re doing your best. You know “your best” is genuinely substantial. And you also know that your best is not always enough for two children whose needs are not equivalent, and that the gap gets filled by your other child’s extraordinary adaptability rather than anything you’ve arranged.

That’s a real thing to carry.

What helps

What actually helps, in my limited and completely non-expert experience, is not big gestures. Not guilt-driven compensation trips or forced quality time.

It’s the small consistent thing. The thing that says: you exist to me independently. Not as the sibling of. Not as the one who manages. As yourself.

Sometimes that’s fifteen minutes before bed where the phone is face-down and there is no interruption.

Sometimes it’s remembering something they said three days ago and asking about it, unprompted.

Sometimes it’s just noticing. Being there in a way that is specifically for them.

It won’t fix the inequality of the situation. But it might — on a good day — mean they know they’re not invisible.

That’s the thing we’re trying to do, I think. Every day, in between everything else.

Making sure they know they’re not invisible.