three
SIBLINGS: THEY CAN BRING THE FUN, AND THEY CAN TAKE IT AWAY
Get out!”
“It’s my room, too! I don’t have to!”
“But I came up here with my homework to get away from you. I’m working!”
“I’m doing my homework, too! I have to memorize this! ‘Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns, driven time and again off course . . .’”
“Stop it!”
“‘Once he has plundered the—the heights—the hallowed—’”
“STOP IT!”
“But I have to learn this! I have to!”
“MOOOOOMMMMMM!”
Wouldn’t it be fun to have siblings who loved each other, played together, stood up for each other, and took care of each other? If only. Instead, those of us with big families too often find ourselves in the Mafia don role of overseeing ever-shifting rivalries and loyalties, while parents of two children watch one-on-one versions of the same games of envy, competition, love, and hatred. And of course, if you’re the parent of an only child, the complaints often come from the outside. Will he be selfish, spoiled, self-centered, unsocialized? (Research says no.) I just heard a story of someone changing pediatricians because one doc kept offering what was apparently a saying in her family: “Only children are lonely children.”
If you’re the parent of a single child, you can skip over this chapter, enjoy the schadenfreude, or read it for ideas that might work when friends are around or extended family is in town. Sibling battles aren’t sucking away any of your happiness. (Although if the general tenor of the societal reaction to your family choice is, you should read Lauren Sandler’s One and Only: The Freedom of Having an Only Child, and the Joy of Being One.)
If you do have multiple kids, then read on. Sibling battles are without a doubt in my top three when it comes to the question, “What sucks for you about parenting?” (Mornings and homework are my other two.) In fact, over the period of writing this book, sibling battles edged out the other two for the top spot. My two daughters, then eleven and twelve, were at a low point in their relationship.
The opening lines of the battle described above (accompanied by the opening lines of The Odyssey) were launched in some form many, many times a day, along with such classics as “That’s my charger!,” “Stop singing!,” and “I was sitting there!” Their fights became the center of all of our family interactions, the first thing I brought up with other parents, the thing that kept me awake at night, and, at one point, the talk of their entire hockey team. They were, I told my husband, ruining our lives.
Here’s the good news: as I researched and wrote this chapter, two things happened, in this order:
I figured out how to get a grip on my own reaction to their endless, escalating bickering.
And things got better.
What Goes Wrong
Of course I’m going to tell you what changed. But first, let’s look, as in every other chapter, at “what goes wrong” here—and, for a change, at what goes right, which we may be losing sight of amid all the chaos. Becoming a happier parent of multiple children isn’t just about how we approach the conflict. It’s also about appreciating all the other moments. Brothers and sisters fight, yes. Parent-reported and observational studies put the number of conflicts between young siblings (seven and under) at between three and seven an hour, and the amount of time spent on those conflicts at about ten minutes of every hour.
Ten minutes. I don’t know about you, but I would have guessed way higher. And my overemphasis on those conflicts may be part of the problem. It’s easier to see what’s wrong than what’s right. Research suggests brothers and sisters have good and natural reasons for conflict. In children of all ages, but especially younger children, the urge to compete for parental attention is innate, and not all bad. Among teens specifically, sibling conflict helps them work out their need to differentiate from family and one another, and to set their own boundaries. Some jostling, at a minimum, is probably inevitable, and pitched verbal and physical battles are normal and even expected.
That doesn’t mean parents, with help from our usual accomplice society, can’t still make things worse. Focusing on the bad times rather than the good is only one of our many well-intentioned mistakes. We compare our children, stick ourselves in the middle of their battles, favor one over the other, or get drawn into their need that everything be “fair.” We expect too much in the way of love and affection between them or demand too little in the way of tolerating differences and playing safe. We put all our effort and attention onto the fighting and conflict, and leave the good times to happenstance. We stick a different label on our children collectively, one that says, “They don’t get along.”
The world around us contributes by offering up a view of siblings in media that emphasizes the fighting far more than the family. When one researcher created a program exposing children to books and cartoons that included sibling conflict resolution on the theory that they might help aid children in learning to solve their own problems, she found that the children learned something else. As described in Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman’s NurtureShock, “After six weeks, the sibling relationship quality had plummeted.” Why? Because the media taught the kids “novel ways to be mean to younger siblings they’d never considered.” Siblings, the children in the study learned, were supposed to fight and tease. In her later study of 261 books that portrayed sibling relationships, the same researcher found that the average book “demonstrated virtually as many negative behaviors as positive ones.” Those unintentional demonstrations, it seems, are just as effectively conveyed as the everyone-gets-along-again endings, and maybe more so.
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 happier 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.
The only way to maintain your own sanity here (which is to say, your only chance at preserving a little happiness under the assault) is to know, at root, what your family policy is in this or any of the other similar disputes—the one about the toy in the toddler’s hands, the one about the shirt from a sister’s closet, and worst of all, the one about the only findable hat of the four identical hats from the Capitals game that a well-meaning relative bought for each of your children. Whose is it? You have no idea. Neither do they, really. Except that they do. It’s “MINE!”
Before you can resolve property disputes like this, you need to answer one basic question: do your kids have to share?
Unless you’re already familiar with Heather Shumaker’s book It’s OK Not to Share, that might sound like a crazy question. But Heather’s mother teaches at a preschool in Columbus, Ohio (where Heather herself went as a child), where she applies what she calls “renegade” ideas. One of those ideas is that the children don’t have to share. If they’re playing with a toy, they, and they alone, decide when it’s time to give another child a chance.
“Young children aren’t ready to share,” Shumaker writes. “They’re ready to take turns.” Teaching children under five that their turn ends whenever another child wants a toy is the wrong lesson. Instead, parents should protect a child’s right to have her full experience with a toy and trust another child’s ability to wait. It’s okay to say, “I’m not done yet.”
You may decide the no-sharing-required philosophy won’t work in your house, or you may need to adjust it for circumstances. When my younger daughter arrived at preschool, there was a “you don’t have to give up your turn” policy with regard to the monkey bars on the playground. Every child was allowed to hang from them, one child at a time, until the playing child was done—the theory being, in part, that the child would exhaust her arm strength before too long had passed.
Back and forth my kid would go, back and forth, dangling from one arm, then going back and forth again—for the entire outdoor play period. Others would wait patiently and never get a turn at all. There seemed to be no limit to her strength or her interest, especially if she knew others were waiting. They had to change the rule to “once across and done.”
That worked, too. You may feel that you have a child who, given a no-sharing policy, would remain at a particularly desirable toy for hours, racing back there after meals, falling asleep there in the evening, and waking only to shriek “I’m not done!” (I might know that child.) So for your family, some toys might come with time or use limits, or turns with all toys might last only until bedtime. What’s important is to find a successful approach that you can feel happy and confident implementing.
The concept of “long turns” and having a right not to share is mostly for children under five. We expect our elementary-school-aged children to behave more equitably, especially with respect to household shared property. Allowing a thirteen-year-old a twelve-hour “long turn” on the only household computer without engaging him in a conversation about the needs and feelings of other family members is clearly not going to work.
But when it comes to the thirteen-year-old’s own device, particularly one purchased from his savings, while you might limit his time on it, you probably wouldn’t require that he share it with his younger sister. You can extend that idea to other personal property, no matter how reasonable the proposed sharing sounds. To take an example from Siblings Without Rivalry, an older sister may not be ready to share a shirt from her closet, even if it’s outgrown. We all get attached to certain objects or even just to the idea of what’s “ours.” That’s normal. One possible family rule there is that she doesn’t have to share her things until she’s ready.
So, what about the mystery item in the garage, the one left untouched for months (or even years) until unearthed by a sibling? If the ownership is unquestioned, the policy least likely to blow back in your face is to support that ownership, which is black-and-white and can be understood by even the youngest child. “He’s right. It’s his if he still wants it. Son, if you decide that maybe you’ve outgrown that Thomas the Tank Engine, your sister would like to play with it. But if not, it’s still yours.”
As for the Capitals hat of unknown origin? If you have a large family of children, you won’t be surprised to hear that this is a problem we confront regularly. For most identical items, we label immediately upon acquisition. But sometimes something gets by me, and there we are, at 6:55 a.m., trying to leave the house when the disputed hat appears on someone’s head. Experience tells me that if left to resolve this without help, three of my four children will come to blows, and even the fourth might be pushed to the limit.
What do I do? Often, I can make an educated guess about whether the hat wearer took the hat from his own cubby, or picked it up wherever he found it. I know which children are most likely to have left a hat in which part of the house, car, or larger universe. I investigate a little, see if I can find other hats and narrow it down. Then I just put it out there: “Look, you know where you got the hat. If it’s not yours, give it back. If you can’t agree on whose hat it is or who can use it today, give it to me and wear another hat.”
We live in New England. There’s always another hat.
PERSONAL SPACE
When it comes to the battle over personal space, there are really two things at play. First, there’s the question of whether a child wants to interact with a sibling or be with her at all. Second, there’s the space itself—the territory. Children can fight over either or, more often, both.
While a complete non-intervention policy over most disputes often results in a tacit favoring of the older, more powerful child, leaving children to work out space disputes is likely to favor the younger of the battling pair. We hit this when one of our daughters was twelve and beginning to want the space to grow into her teenaged self, and the other was a young-for-her-age eleven, struggling a little bit to find her own footing. They fought constantly: over their bedroom, their friends, their behavior in front of the other’s friends, how tall their older brother was and whether the younger child’s fifth birthday had occurred on a Wednesday. If one said, “It’s cold out,” the other said, “It is not.”
At the same time, it was clear that my younger daughter admired her older sister. She wanted to be with her, even while she resented being excluded. Anywhere our big girl went, her little sister followed, out of affection, desperation, and a sheer need to poke the beast. Finally, the twelve-year-old took to getting up at 5:30, before the rest of the family got up at 6:20, in order to have some time for herself.
One morning we were awakened by furious shouting, slamming doors, and the noise of feet pounding through the upstairs and down the hall to our room. “She got up! She got up on purpose and I was holding the bathroom door open and she ran under my arm and got in the shower and she turned it on and it’s not fair!”
It took a long time to calm the house down from all the rude awakenings, but later, I found my younger daughter’s alarm clock. Sure enough, she had set it to 5:29.
This isn’t an uncommon dynamic between an older and younger sibling. If one wants to be alone and the other wants to be together, the one who wants to be alone might not be able to find any space without your help. Little brothers and sisters can be incredibly persistent. It’s not really alone time if you’re spending it in your closet with a five-year-old standing outside banging on the door (and while some kids will eventually go away, some really won’t).
“I was the little sister knocking on the door of my brother’s room,” said Shumaker. “I was the kid who wanted company, he was a loner type who loved his private space. But when he granted me access, and we played together, I was on top of the world.” How can we help our children begin to respect another’s need for alone time on the one side, and open themselves up again to their siblings on the other?
“I think parents need to make some decisions around what territory children can be possessive of,” said Shumaker. “If a child has a bedroom, they should be able to say if they want another child in it. Or maybe they should be the boss of their bed or a little closet.” Other parents suggest designated “alone time,” like right after school. “Children may not like being temporarily banished,” said Shumaker, “but just like they can handle waiting for a toy, they can handle this.” To make it easier, she suggests asking an older child when she feels like she might be ready to play with a younger sibling. In our family, playing with a little brother or sister can sometimes be a way to get some extra video game time, and we intentionally choose games that require cooperation as well as competition.
After the morning incident, we realized that our girls needed us to guide them in working this out. We found calmer moments to get them to agree on some ground rules that would give the older girl some space while not giving her the right to toss her sister from their shared room on a whim. We endured many complaints from the younger daughter when she was excluded, and even more from the older girl when she couldn’t be indulged. Sometimes, especially when our older daughter had friends over, we took that chance to spend time with our younger girl alone. Eventually, as our younger daughter started to accept the need to give her sister some space, our older girl came around, and they were able to start doing things together again.
When Things Get Physical
Before you had children, you probably could have told me exactly how you’d handle an incident of hitting, biting, or kicking between siblings. Intolerable, you might have said. Hands are not for hitting! People are not for hurting! You, of course, as a parent, would draw a nice clear black line.
Now that you are that parent, you know things are more complicated than that. You know that one child can provoke another into a physical response, that you can’t believe anyone when it comes to a disagreement over what constitutes an “accident,” and that sometimes they really are having fun pinching and poking—but sometimes they aren’t, or sometimes they’re having fun until suddenly one isn’t. You know, in short, that blame can be hard to assign and that the line is much fuzzier than you ever imagined, but that it’s still important to draw it. It’s just much more difficult than you thought it would be.
Most sibling conflict, even when it gets a little physical, is minor within the grand scheme of things, even though it may not feel like it at the time. Rivalry is normal and even healthy for kids. Sibling aggression, though, is different. At its worst, it’s a form of family violence, and one that should be taken seriously (and that requires professional help). For most families, though, it’s more a question of keeping things from ever getting out of hand without losing your mind in the process (as you surely will if you get involved every time someone kicks someone else in the backseat).
How do you know when to intervene? You don’t, most of the time. Not for certain. There’s the rare case when the bite marks on the screaming baby’s arm can be easily traced back to the beaming toddler seated next to him, but most of the time, it’s all shades of gray. You will come down like a bolt of lightning on the child accused of pushing another child’s broken arm, only to hear later that even the offended child thought it was an accident. You will accept the “it was an accident” explanation for the child who Rollerblades over the other child’s toes only to hear a tearful confession later.
You may not know what’s really going on until they tell you, and by then they’ll probably be grown with kids of their own. Meanwhile, here are a few strategies to make things easier.
Make it a big deal. Don’t look the other way, not for any of it. Even if they both say they’re joking around. Even if you know there was provocation. Get in there between them. Restate your family rules: there’s no hitting, no pinching, no holding someone’s legs so they can’t roll off the back of the couch like they meant to, and no kicking the person holding your legs. (It’s okay if these aren’t exactly rules you’ve been over before.)
Or don’t. On the other hand, depending on your family composition and your personal history, you may choose to look the other way for nearly all of it. My three youngest children do sometimes get physical, but they are all generally the same size and shape, and equally likely to attack or defend. Their alliances shift. No one is ganged up on; there is no constant victim or aggressor. I wish it were not so, but I get that there are just times when children who live together—at least, my children—roughhouse. Feelings get conveyed in pokes, whacks, and kicks that can’t be expressed any other way. The older they get, the more they’re able to work it out on their own, even with the occasional hip-check. I’ve largely stopped getting in their way.
Treat both attacker and victim equally. When all you know is that he said, and then she said, and then somebody did something and then somebody did something else and then there were tears, try this: treat them both equally. If there’s an injury that merits snuggling and sympathy, gather everyone up. “Oh, that must really hurt where she hit you. Oh, you must have been so mad to do that. This is terrible! What can we do to make things better?”
Alternatively, if you’re just frustrated with the lot of them, take it out on everyone equally with no consideration of blame. “That’s it, playtime is over. You—empty the dishwasher. You—go upstairs and bring down all the laundry.”
There are no innocents. There are exceptions to this—sometimes you’re holding a hockey stick and you turn around and it catches someone right in the head—but for the most part, kids who are hurting each other or getting hurt were already doing something you’ve told them not to do. You cannot, for example, get hit by flailing arms if you aren’t giving an unwanted “hug.” If you’re not lying across the back of the couch where someone is reading, putting your feet on that someone’s neck, you’re not going to get pushed off the couch.
Why won’t they just keep their distance from one another during day-to-day life? Why do they get so rough? I do not know. Sometimes, your kids know the risks, and they do dumb things to one another anyway, and then someone gets hurt. It’s hard to cope with, and it seems as if it ought to be easy to know what to do, but it’s not. If everyone involved feels terrible afterward, you can at least feel secure that you’re on the right track.
Pure Deviltry
Sometimes there is no conflict. Sometimes, there are just children, using their powers for evil with time-honored techniques such as repeating everything a sibling says, scooching over on the couch until a sibling is squashed up against the arm, touching the cookie a brother is eating, or walking up behind a sister and putting cold fingers against the back of her neck.
This morning two of my children argued for ten minutes over whether their school was closed for Rosh Hashanah in 2015. Other classics include “who’s taller,” “who’s faster,” and “my hockey team could beat your hockey team.” Mostly, this is just background noise. If I get involved—some of these are factual questions, after all: “I could just measure you” or “Look that up”—they’ll move on to one of the other countless recurring disputes, like “Who found the big chocolate bunny that Easter two years ago when everything was outside?” or “Whose green tie-dyed Frisbee from the craft thing we all did on summer vacation is stuck on the roof of the shed?” So I try to ignore rather than intervene.
But a bickering backdrop can be hard to put up with, or worse, it can start you off on a mental hamster wheel: Should I stop them? When should I stop them? How should I stop them? In his book “Mom, Jason’s Breathing on Me!,” Anthony E. Wolf has an answer. His advice? Stop them as soon as you’re annoyed, and without taking sides or addressing whatever they’re squabbling about. You do you, which might mean you tune them out, and might mean you bring the hammer down every time. At our house, that sounds like “Both of you, stop that right now,” and “I’m going to pull the car over until the two of you work this out.” Every so often, I see another car pulled over to the side of the road for apparently no reason, and I look in the window, and I see a couple of kids waving their arms and a parent with his or her head down on the steering wheel. I always give a little wave. Solidarity.
What to Say
Whether it’s real fighting or just general bickering, I find it helps me to have actual, go-to phrases I can employ rather than shrieking the first thing off the top of my head, which is rarely constructive. Most of them I didn’t make up—I collected them over years of reading and writing about parenting, and years of trying to improve the sibling situation at our house. I’ve nailed down the origin of some of my favorites, several of which I use so often that they provoke eye-rolling from my kids, who know that what I really mean is “I get that you’re upset, but I am so not going to be helpful.” Some are from Siblings Without Rivalry:
I have confidence that you two can work it out.
It’s your whatever, and it’s your choice whether to share it. If you can, that would be great, but if you can’t, that’s okay, too.
And from “Mom, Jason’s Breathing on Me!”:
That sounds really frustrating.
Gosh, that must be really annoying.
(Sometimes I suspect both of these are themselves somewhat frustrating and annoying, but sometimes they invite a child to keep talking until she comes to her own solution or has emptied out her feelings. It’s important to remember that you don’t have to go in there. She is frustrated, she is annoyed. You don’t have to be.)
When my kids were younger, the language was more about teaching than leaving them to sort it out. A few go-tos from Peaceful Parent, Happy Siblings:
Looks like we have a problem. We can solve this.
Can you tell your brother how you feel?
Do you think your sister likes that?
What did you hear your brother say?
I reached out to my community of parents, and I asked them: what are your set-piece sayings when it comes to battling siblings? Quite a few people offered variations on “If no one’s bleeding, I don’t want to hear about it.” Here are the best of the rest:
You can be mad, but you can’t be mean.
—Jessica Michaelson, Austin, Texas
God willing, you will know each other a lot longer than I will be around, so figure it out.
—Andrea Hoag, Lawrence, Kansas
Why are you telling me this? Sounds like you have a problem with him.
—Karen Smith, Glen Ellyn, Illinois
If you can’t agree on it, no one gets it.
—Rob Jones, Westchester County, New York
It doesn’t matter who started it.
—Jeremy Shatan, New York, New York
I was a sibling once. I know how it goes. I don’t need the whole story. I trust you can work it out without me.
—Bernadette Noll, Austin, Texas
Who are you people and what are you doing in my house?
—Deb Amlen, New York, New York
When It’s Time to Extract Yourself
I’ve been drawing from my daughters’ rough patch throughout this chapter (the alarm clock story in the “Personal Space” section occurred about halfway through). I suspect it could have been a lot shorter if I’d started writing this chapter earlier in the process.
I was used to brokering multi-sibling bickering and shifting rivalries. We had worked with our kids on negotiating conflict for many years, not as some sort of organized perfect-parent plan, but just over the process of growing up in a big and somewhat complicated family. We had sat down between them during fights and taught them to consider one another’s perspectives. We had modeled finding solutions to disagreements over space or objects. We had taught them alternatives to physically expressing anger, like yelling “I am so mad” and “I don’t like you right now” or retreating to a safe space. When things went wrong, they had the tools to at least begin to look inside themselves and ask, Why am I angry? What’s really wrong? What can I change about this, and what do I have to live with? I thought we’d reached the “no need to intervene” stage.
The sudden and continuous running fight between my daughters, though, felt like something new. It didn’t feel like a run-of-the-mill little kid spat. It was vicious and it broke out at almost every opportunity, which is to say every time the girls (who shared a hockey team, a school, and a bedroom) were together. It was so constant, so loud, so abusive, so often physical, although in a minor way—tearing things out of one another’s hands, slamming doors in faces. I didn’t know what to do. In general, they’d all gotten along pretty well before. I’d never seen anything like this.
It wouldn’t be putting it too strongly to say that I panicked.
I took it all personally. Sometimes I sided with my older daughter, especially if she wanted to be left alone. I, too, notice that her younger sister is not a person who lets you be alone when she’s in the room. She hums, she sings a little, she moves noisily. She likes people to know she’s there.
And sometimes I sided with my younger daughter. Why did my big girl have to be so mean all of a sudden? Why could she not include her sister in things like baking cookies with her friend? And the bossiness! I, too, would make everyone late for hockey practice if I had my older daughter yelling at me like that.
But mostly I was just so angry at them both, particularly on the day when I drove them for more than five hours to compete in a hockey tournament, which their team won—a victory they celebrated by dragging me into their loud, furious, pushing-and-shoving argument in the hallway outside the team locker room. I’m not sure I’ve ever been angrier or more embarrassed. And I just didn’t get it. How could they act this way? Did they not understand how lucky they were to have each other?
I should step back here and tell you that I am an only child. That I had a sister, who died before I was born, and in spite of having had a great childhood with my loving and fun parents, I believed that siblings were something I always wanted. That we adopted our younger daughter into our family when she was nearly four, because I’d always wanted a big family, and that we chose to adopt a little girl, back when it was an amorphous choice instead of the inevitability we now see, in part so that my older daughter would have a sister.
This is not, any of it, even a little relevant when it came to helping the eleven- and twelve-year-olds in front of me find a way back to their previously loving relationship. It is, however, why it took me so long to get this right.
The hockey tournament proved to be something of a turning point for the girls. They, too, were embarrassed. Some of their teammates took them to task; others were, at a minimum, irritated by the fuss. In the car later, they were able to talk about some of what was bothering them beyond each other, things to do with the team and other changes. They had been listening to us. They admitted taking out frustrations on each other that couldn’t be safely released anywhere else. They promised to try harder. In retrospect, I can see that they meant it.
But I couldn’t let it go. I ended that five-hour late-night drive still fuming. I swore I would never take them to another tournament. I talked about it endlessly, conversations not centered on “What should I do?” but “Can you believe what awful little jerks they were?” At home, I started to berate them for fighting all the time, even when they weren’t. “Come to the general store,” I’d say, “if you can keep from fighting long enough in the car to do it.” “Don’t let the girls sit together,” I’d say in a restaurant. “I can’t take it.” They had been so horrible! They were ruining our lives! Everything was awful, and I could not imagine what I was going to do about it.
Underneath it all, I was frightened. What if this never stopped? What would it mean for our family’s long-term happiness if two of us couldn’t stand to be near each other?
It was about then, a little desperate and a lot miserable, that I (while wondering whether I was able to write a book about happier parents at all) started to work on this chapter. I read research studies, I talked to parents about how their own children fought and how they kept their own emotions in check when they handled it. I consulted the old books on my bookshelf and ordered new ones. I called the authors of those books and other experts besides. And I realized, slowly, that what I was seeing between my girls wasn’t some huge, family-destroying Shakespearean drama, but just ordinary sibling stuff that I needed to approach in an ordinary way.
They were getting older, and they needed to find a new way to live with one another. They needed to push each other away in order to find their way to a relationship that wasn’t just dictated by all that forced togetherness. And I needed to let it happen.
We had done enough conflict resolution. I didn’t need to get in between them and make sure they heard and understood each other. I certainly didn’t need to take sides. I needed to back off. If you see something, don’t always say something. I let them bicker without starting in on my “you girls always ruin everything” speech. I let most of the still-regular arguments about who could be in the bedroom or who had been first to set up at the table to do homework play out without my stomping over to join in. If I had something to offer I said it to them afterward, separately. (To the older: “Thank you for not engaging with your little sister when she was mad about her chores earlier”; to the younger: “You know you weren’t really upset with your sister but at yourself, right? Let’s try to find a better way to handle that.”) I recited the words of Rob Jones, a father of two and one of five siblings himself: “They get along well, and they fight well.” There was nothing wrong.
And things were, rather suddenly and very distinctly, better. Not perfect, but better. As I put the finishing touches on this chapter, they’re still better. They still argue over the right to be alone in the bedroom and whether the younger is intentionally eavesdropping on the older and her friends (she is). But they’ve returned to where they were before, mostly getting along fine, frequently doing things together, occasionally helping one another out and just generally being sisters. When my younger daughter broke her arm the night before school started this year, she begged her sister to come to the hospital with her, and my older daughter dropped her plans for pre-packing the perfect backpack and got into the backseat to try every possible distraction for the long drive to the emergency room.
It turned out okay. I won’t lie to you—I really didn’t think it would. But it did.
Increasing the Joy
Addressing the conflict is only part of increasing your family happiness when it comes to siblings. We don’t just want them to be able to fight fairly (and ideally fight less). We also want them to grow up as close and loving as their personalities allow. The goal isn’t just not-so-bad. Some of that comes naturally, just with proximity and familiarity. All their lives, your siblings will share experiences no one else has (among other things, being raised by you). They’ll have a history and a bond that’s unique. But we don’t want to rely on happenstance to build that into a strong lifelong relationship. How can we actively encourage the good times that really count?
ACCEPT THE NEGATIVE
Ironically enough, feeling happier about your children’s relationship means accepting some of the bad—in particular, their negative thoughts and words about one another. New big brothers and big sisters will often say they “hate” the baby. Older siblings will “hate” one another. They have entire dossiers of why their sibling stinks, including every crime ever committed by the one against the other and a whole lot more besides.
“Accept the feelings, but not the behaviors,” says Shumaker. “Don’t be scared of the jealousy and the fear and the desires. If we’re honest, adults feel those things, too, especially about new babies. Accept the emotion—and don’t say, ‘Oh, I know deep down you love the baby’—and they’ll grow to like and love each other a lot faster.”
Accepting the negative emotions, and allowing your child to express them to you without registering shock and horror, also defuses them. Resenting a new sister, or furious anger at an older brother, can be big feelings for small people. If your child can say “I hate him!” to you and not be kicked out of the family—or even get a response like “It’s so hard when the baby needs me and you want me, too,” or “I know, my brother used to leave me out when he had a friend over, and it made me so mad”—that means it’s okay to have those thoughts, and it’s possible to get past them.
LET RELATIONSHIPS EVOLVE
People, even children, change. My daughters were having a lot of negative feelings about each other (to say the least). I needed to learn to let them have and express those feelings without making things worse. When I left them to work out as much as they could together, I also helped them see that the feelings were both okay and transient.
KEEP THE FUN RATIO HIGH
Christine Carter, author of Raising Happiness: 10 Simple Steps for More Joyful Kids and Happier Parents, suggests we actively establish a measurable goal for good times. “Positive interactions between siblings need to outnumber negative ones by about five to one,” she writes. She bases her theory on our human tendency to remember negative experiences more readily than positive ones, and on research into marriages and high-performance work teams that shows that when positive actions and words outweigh negative ones at about that ratio, all kinds of partnerships are more successful.
So without adding things to your schedule, do try to ensure that your days and weeks include plenty of time for siblings, no matter what the age gap, to enjoy one another. Offer them extra time with something they like to do together that you usually limit (in our case, that’s video games). Make sure there isn’t always a friend over when all siblings are free. Instead of bedtime, establish “kidtime,” when all siblings need to be in shared bedrooms, upstairs, or however your house divides into kid and adult territory, and leave them to it for half an hour or so before starting the nightly routine or telling older kids to turn the lights out.
Encourage the kind of family storytelling that turns bad times into funny memories. My oldest son once accidentally swung his tiny sister’s face into the corner of a bathroom cabinet, resulting in a fantastically colorful black eye that started out as a lump the size of a Ping-Pong ball. He was eight years old at the time, and he thought he had dislocated her entire eyeball. We still laugh about it. Vacation disasters, very silly arguments, the time one child was accidentally left at the grocery store—those can all become family lore. I suspect “the hockey tournament where we almost killed each other” will end up on that list, too, eventually. It doesn’t necessarily have to have felt good at the time to become a good memory later.
GIVE THEM SIBLING TIME THAT ISN’T FAMILY TIME
Make sure your children have time together without you. Encourage their collective independence. Send them in pairs on “missions” in the grocery store or as a pack to the movies. Drop them off at mini-golf or the library. On vacation or at an airport, challenge them to try something with each other, but without you. Remind them to look out for each other, and not just older after younger, either. Make sure they’re all in this together and, as they grow up, support any effort they make to stay that way.
On their Happier podcast, sisters Gretchen Rubin and Elizabeth Craft often talk about how their parents financially supported their relationship by paying for them to visit one another once Gretchen and then Elizabeth (who is five years younger) had moved out of the house. They credit the plane and train tickets they couldn’t easily afford with helping them develop a close relationship as young adults and, later, as adults.
SEE THE GOOD TIMES
Our children don’t have to be happy to be together every minute of every day for things to be pretty good. If children spend, as one statistic I cited earlier in the chapter suggested, on average ten minutes of every hour together fighting, that still leaves fifty other minutes. That’s not too bad, really. When you stop looking at the ten minutes (the trees), you can see the rest of the hour (the forest). Your job is to appreciate the forest even though your inclination is just to cut down that one tree.
SOAK UP THE GOOD
Just sit and watch and absorb while your kids are making brownies together. When your younger child asks the older for advice about a school activity, relish their ability to help one another. Even if they’ve ganged up against you, appreciate it. They’ve got each other’s backs. That’s what you wanted. Revel in it.