These NICU Nurses Wrote a Storybook for Big Siblings, and It’s Melting Hearts

Image source: WTNH

When a fragile newborn is admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit, almost everyone’s attention turns to the baby in the isolette. But four nurses at Connecticut Children’s in Farmington noticed someone who often gets overlooked: the big brother or big sister at home, trying to make sense of why mom and dad keep disappearing to the hospital.

So the nurses did something about it. They wrote and helped illustrate a children’s storybook called “A Message to My Sibling”, designed to gently explain the NICU to young children and give them a way to stay connected to a baby they may not be able to hold yet.

The idea grew out of one family’s experience. The project was inspired by a baby named Anna, who was born at 31 weeks weighing just 2 pounds, 13 ounces, and the older siblings left wondering what was happening to their new sister.

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Premature and critically ill infants can spend weeks or months in the NICU, and that timeline pulls parents away from their other children for long, unpredictable stretches. For a toddler or young child, that absence is hard to understand, and a single visit to a unit full of monitors, wires, and machines can be frightening.

The nurses wanted to change that. Working with illustrator Cheri Lenhow over the course of several years, they developed a book that introduces the realities of intensive care in a way a child can absorb without panic. The first copies were printed this week.

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A big part of the book’s purpose is demystifying the equipment that keeps NICU babies alive. “It was really about introducing these things without scaring them, because it can be scary to see this equipment,” Lenhow told WTNH, referring to devices like CPAP machines that a child might spot at the bedside.

The book is also interactive. “We included pages where they can draw pics of themselves, or things that they enjoy,” Lenhow said. Children can color, draw, and write notes to their new sibling, and those pages are then displayed in the baby’s hospital room so the family stays connected even when they can’t all be together.

Family-centered care has become a defining standard in neonatal nursing, and this project is a reminder that the “family” in family-centered care extends well beyond the parents. As Connecticut Children’s nurse Kelsey MarcAurele put it, a NICU admission “doesn’t just affect the baby; it affects the entire family: siblings, parents, grandparents, everyone feels that.”

For bedside nurses, sibling support is often the piece that gets squeezed out when a unit is busy and acuity is high. A low-cost, reusable tool like a storybook gives staff a concrete way to address it without adding hours to an already full shift. It also shows how frontline nurses, the people who see family dynamics up close every day, are frequently the ones best positioned to spot a gap in care and design the fix. Bedside-driven projects like this one can become part of a unit’s family-support toolkit and even strengthen a hospital’s case for nursing excellence recognition.