Along with portraying their relationships in a negative light, much of the way society encourages us to structure our children’s lives today pushes them apart. In a world of fewer activities and smaller houses, siblings might have spent more free time together, and more time in unscheduled free play, still together, with neighbors and other families. Now, many children spend large chunks of time in age-segregated activities. Although about two-thirds of children still share a room (as mine do), in middle- and upper-middle-class suburbs, increasing numbers of children sleep on their own. That decrease in time spent together lessens the need to resolve conflict and condenses the time available in which to do it.
The research does offer some good news. The constant give-and-take of a sibling relationship can help children learn to handle conflict, negotiate, hone their verbal skills, regulate their emotions, and gauge the emotions of others. And while our children may spend less time with their siblings than did earlier generations, they’re still clocking plenty of hours together: at age eleven, children spend about 33 percent of their time with their siblings (more than with friends, teachers, parents, or even alone). Even teenagers spend about ten hours a week with their brothers and sisters.
Sibling relationships are formative. As parents, we can see that the way our children treat one another helps to shape who they are at home and out in the world. We want them to be loving, and it’s hard for us to be happy when it feels as if they’re not, and even harder when every night includes a battle that draws the whole family in and leaves everyone emotionally drained. So how can we as parents reduce the level of conflict we live with, remain calm when children bicker, and—better yet—strengthen sibling bonds to make for a happier family overall?
Managing the Conflict, and Making It Better
Conflict between siblings may not actually be inevitable, but if you’re experiencing it, it’s almost inevitably making you and your family life less happy overall. It’s also hard to strengthen bonds and increase the joy in the time your whole family spends together when two or more of its members are locked in what feels like mortal combat. So let’s start there: what can you do when the battles rage and the cease-fires are temporary?
One of the most important ways to maintain your own happiness even when the squabbling begins is to know your own strategy and to have confidence in it. Decide what to do, then do it. Research shows that parents with some training in managing sibling conflict also feel better able to manage their own emotional response to the fighting. Parents of children between five and ten years old were taught to help children by interrupting the conflict to describe each child’s perspective, and then invite them to suggest solutions. Those strategies might work for you (and there’s more detail in the next section), but even if other responses work better in your situation, you can reduce your own emotional involvement by making active choices around how you’ll handle whatever is happening at your house instead of reacting minute by minute. Here are some ideas to get you started.
INTERVENE OR IGNORE?
When it comes to what to do when they start fighting, the first question is the obvious one. Do you intervene, or do you ignore? It’s both a philosophical debate—what, as a general rule, will you do?—and a situation-specific one—what will you do right now?
Considered as a bedrock of parenting strategy, “intervene or ignore” is often presented as a black-and-white question. Either “good parents know that children need to be taught to manage their emotions and resolve conflict” (intervene) or “good parents know that conflict is really about parental attention, and so they let children figure it out for themselves” (ignore). In theory, all you have to do is decide which kind of a “good parent” you are, and then carry on with either giving each child equal time to air their side of the story before engaging them in conflict resolution or shouting “you kids work it out” from the couch.
Is anything ever that simple? Rather than being a single debate, the “intervene or ignore” question turns out to be a continuum. To answer it, you need to assess your larger situation—what do your children need from you now—and know that it’s an evolving process. Broadly speaking, younger siblings need more help. Three- to five-year-olds tend to behave even more antagonistically when parents don’t intervene, while even slightly older children (five to nine) are better able to resolve a situation on their own. That generalization, though, serves as little more than a starting place. In your family, what do your children typically fight about, and have you given them tools they can use to either solve a dispute or recognize an impasse (or bait) and walk away? If you don’t feel that they have those abilities, you can expect to invest time in helping them now before you let yourself leave them to it later.
When younger children are at odds, don’t minimize their problem, says Joanna Faber, coauthor (with Julie King) of How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen. “Don’t tell them that ‘blocks aren’t worth fighting over.’” To them, there’s nothing more important at that moment. Instead, agree. “Say, ‘Boy, this is a tough problem,’ then narrate what you’re hearing,” she suggests. Cleo wants to build with blocks, but Colin needs all of them for his tower. “If you come up with solutions with them, they’ll quickly start to do that with each other,” she says.
“By offering a sort of color commentary on their problem, you’re doing two things,” agrees her coauthor, Julie King. “You’re showing them that you hear them and that you understand. And you’re slowing things down so that they can hear each other as well. Taking another’s perspective is one of the most important skills we can teach our kids.”
Older children should be more able to see the situation from their sibling’s point of view, but that doesn’t mean they’ll do so without coaching (or prodding). If you’re hearing a dispute between kids who can’t move on from argument to problem-solving, your next move should be based on the situation and where you think they are in terms of knowing what to do next (as well as what will preserve your sanity). They may each be well aware of the other’s perspective and be choosing to ignore it, or the battle may be so heated that their normal problem-solving skills are obscured by emotion.
Those are challenges that children have to deal with eventually, but now may not be the time. If you do need to step in, the goal is the same as with younger children—showing them that you hear them and understand, and helping them to do the same for one another—but the strategy may be different. You may need to wait and talk to them when they’ve cooled down, or use humor to take the edge off. (Approaching them with the singsongy voice of a preschool teacher can be pretty effective.)
You may also just want to let them work it out on their own, even if you can tell it’s not going well, or you may decide to stomp in yourself and remove whatever’s at the center of the argument. You don’t have to get it right every time. Sometimes you’ll intervene and wish you’d ignored; sometimes it will go the other way around. Chances are, you’ll have another opportunity to make that call sooner than you’d like.
The Conflicts
Typically, sibling battles fall into one of four categories: jealousy, property rights, space occupation, and pure deviltry. Any one of those can fit in anywhere on yet another continuum—that of minor, everyday bickering up to emergency room visits or words that truly wound. The first is tolerable, or can be; the progression obviously moves toward unhappiness for all. The more you can teach your children to handle at least some conflict on their own, the more likely things are to stay on the bickering side of the curve, whether you choose to intervene or not—and particularly as children get older, “not” is the goal.
“All I do is get stressed when I become a referee,” said Lori Zimmerman, a mother of two teenage girls in Delaware. It doesn’t matter what she actually says or does, but how the girls hear it. “It always appears to one that I’m taking the other one’s side.”
Backing yourself out of that referee role will make you a happi
er parent, but it involves setting expectations—for yourself and your kids—on the front end. Establish a family philosophy in the problem spots: this is how property/space/emotions/annoyances are handled at our house. Help your kids learn to apply it, starting with lots of involvement, listening, and repeating of feelings. Teach them to see what’s really wrong (siblings are a safe space to take out a lot of frustrations) and learn to empathize at least a little with one another. Finally, step back to let them work it out. (That last, incidentally, is very much where I fell down, but more on that later.) That’s a good overarching strategy—here’s how to approach it on each of the most common battlegrounds.
JEALOUSY
“Hey! She got a bigger piece!” So much of sibling rivalry boils down to just that—she got a bigger piece of cake. Of the backseat. Of the pretend pork chop cooked in the toy kitchen. Of you.
This is one that starts early. There you are, holding that baby, all the time. Baby, baby, baby. And suddenly, there’s your big kid, the one who really wanted a baby sister, administering secret pinches, slamming doors when you’re trying to get that baby down for a nap, and taking the baby’s squeaky giraffe toy at every opportunity.
Here’s my favorite strategy for jealousy, and it comes pretty much straight from the pages of Siblings Without Rivalry by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish: do you need some more?
I see you have the baby’s giraffe. Do you want me to help you find your baby toys?
I see you’re having a hard time staying quiet while I try to get the baby to nap. Do you need more hugs and snuggles for yourself when she’s asleep?
Oh, you think she got a lot of spaghetti. There’s plenty—do you want more?
Now, I hear you. This is not a cure-all. You’ve got “buts”: But I still have to get the baby to nap. But she doesn’t want her old baby toys, she wants the baby’s toys. But there isn’t always more spaghetti. Or if there is, it’s a waste to give it to her because she won’t eat it. But that kid is always going to want what her sister has.
All arguably true. But instead of looking at this as a single strategy, try considering it a philosophy. In our family, there is enough for everyone. You will never do without the love or spaghetti you need. That doesn’t mean everyone always gets everything they want. Sometimes, it’s “I see you’re upset that she got new sneakers. When you need them, we will get you new sneakers, too,” or “Oh, you wish you could go to Joey’s birthday party. Wouldn’t it be fun if your friend had a birthday party at the same time as Joey?” Approach the jealousy as about the envious child, not about the envied. What do you need? Is there something you can do to get there?
By consistently saying, “Let’s think about you and what you’re feeling, wanting, and wishing instead of what someone else has,” you’re shifting the focus to a better place. Your child will never be able to control what happens with her sibling—or, for that matter, with anyone else. There will always be times when he wants something someone else has. What he can control is how he reacts to those feelings.
BUT THAT’S NOT FAIR
You’ll be a happier parent if you can tattoo the following somewhere within your brain: fair doesn’t always mean equal. The teenaged hockey player does get more spaghetti than his six-year-old sister, even though she plays hockey, too. They don’t always have to all get new winter coats. Just because you had time to drive one to a friend’s house yesterday does not mean you’re obligated to drive another to the playground today.
Fair doesn’t even have to mean you’re trying to be “equal,” especially when questions of responsibility and privilege are afoot. “If your children don’t think you’re unfair sometimes, you’re not doing your job,” said Dr. Kenneth Ginsburg, a pediatrician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and the author of Raising Kids to Thrive: Balancing Love with Expectations and Protection with Trust. “You’re supposed to change the boundaries according to what they can handle.”
Again, what you’re hoping to do for your child is to defuse the comparison mechanism as best you can. This is about your plate, your coat, today as opposed to yesterday. It’s a good idea to have some sort of plan for recurring debates, like who pushes the button in the elevator or who rides in the front seat. My favorite idea there comes from Sharon Van Epps, a mother of three in Seattle. “Each child has a day, and if it’s your day, you do all the things. You get the one leftover cookie, you get to go first, you get to sit next to Mommy.” Every week, each child has two “days,” and the seventh day is Mommy’s. Her children are teenagers now, and they’ve been successfully doing this since they were toddlers.
You can also give your children tools for deciding these things themselves. There’s the classic “you cut, I choose” option for splitting things like cookies and cake, or “tit for tat” for a shared job (you pick up one, I pick up one). You want them to seek “fairness” when they’re resolving things together, so especially when they’re younger, you will be teaching them to seek out compromises and solutions. But you don’t want to become the court of final appeal on all such questions. Leave them totally without resources, and although research does support the idea that they’ll start leaving you out of the equation, it also suggests that the younger or weaker child will constantly wind up on the losing side, and that both children might believe you tacitly endorse that result. That’s why, in this case, you intervene to teach the skills you expect them to learn to use themselves.
“It’s not parental intervention that’s the problem,” says Laura Markham, a clinical psychologist, mother of two, and the author of Peaceful Parent, Happy Siblings. “It’s taking sides.” So, especially with younger children, if you sit down and facilitate a happier ending when you’re able, they’ll be more likely to try to achieve the same thing when you’re not around. What does each child think is “fair”? Can she put herself in her brother’s shoes and ask what might be “fair” to him, too?
Maybe she can, maybe she can’t. Maybe, in the end, you’re going to stop the dispute by removing its cause, whatever it is. “No television for anyone if you can’t agree on what to watch”; “The Thomas tracks are going to be put away for now if you can’t play together.” That’s okay. The evolution of your children’s relationship to one another will be gradual and packed with what look like setbacks—but if you feel like you’re on the right track, it’s much easier to roll with that. Your goal is to teach them to tell each other what they want (not what they don’t want the other to have), to consider the other perspective, and to find their own “fair” resolution—or cope with your solution, which will nearly always be neutral but negative. The dispute is resolved, but now nobody’s happy. Except you, because you can be happy when your children aren’t.
Of course you treat them fairly. Don’t you? There’s a larger issue at hand, one that’s far more important than just who has more chips in her bowl. Are you basically “fair”? Parents and children are people. Some pairs click more easily than others, some stages of childhood are easier to relate to or more intensely demanding. Some years may find you coaching your daughter’s hockey team, or feeling constantly at odds with a child who tends to argue. Some of us find younger children easier, others deal better with teenagers.
“Parents need to focus on whether we’re meeting individual needs instead of worrying whether each one is getting the exact same thing at the exact same time,” says Dr. Markham. “We get really annoyed when we hear ‘that’s not fair,’ because it feels like an attack on us.” Instead, she suggests, come back to what we know to be true—we basically put all our kids on an equal footing. Worry about it only if you have a sense that, lately, that hasn’t been the case, because the baby is taking up all of your time, or you’ve been really giving your attention to your middle schooler’s class play.
If that’s where you are, adjudicating a momentary cake dispute is not the time
to put things right. Instead, choose another time to talk to your child (“Hey, I feel like I haven’t seen enough of you lately—what can we do together this afternoon?”) or just make a plan and put it into action. Some parents keep specific “date nights” with their children while others (like me) track these things more loosely, but you should feel a strong separate connection with each of your kids. That’s how you keep things “fair.” The child whose bucket of good times with a parent is full is more capable of watching the baby be rocked to sleep than the one whose bucket is empty (and some children have bigger buckets than others). The best way to stop “that’s not fair” before it even starts is to try to keep things as balanced as you can among your children’s differing needs and to make sure every child feels seen, treasured, loved, and important within the family fold.
PROPERTY RIGHTS: DO YOU HAVE TO SHARE?
“That’s mine!”
“But you’re not using it!”
“But that’s mine! Give it back!”
“I found it in the garage. You haven’t even touched it in months!”
“I don’t care. I was looking for it. Give it!”
“You only want it because I have it!”
(In unison) “DAAAAAAD!”
And you’re off on one of the most common sibling debates of this or any century. What is “it”? It doesn’t matter. It could be a Rubik’s cube, a gold coin, or a paper insert from the American Girl magazine.
How to Be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life, and Loving (Almost) Every Minute Page 8
