From the parents’ perspective, a new sibling is a gift beyond measure: a friend for life. But from a child’s point of view, at least in the beginning, another baby in the family may look more like a gift for the parents and a disaster for the dislodged older sibling. At the very least, being forced to share parents with a new sister or brother brings up the worry for older children that they’ll receive less of what they want and need. And if we’re honest, we have to admit that there’s some truth in our child’s fear. As parents, we’ve all felt how hard it can be to meet the needs of one child, let alone two or more.
So all siblings will feel some rivalry, and some factors beyond our control can put strain on the sibling relationship. But sibling love is just as natural as the rivalry, and we as parents can help it win out over the inevitable jealousies. In fact, the most important factors influencing the sibling relationship are arguably within the parents’ control. This chapter outlines some factors that can impact the sibling relationship, for better and for worse. The rest of the book gives you the blueprint for how you can support your children in developing a close, rewarding sibling relationship.
I was six when my sister was born. I’m thirty-four now, but I still remember worrying that my parents must not love me any more, and being afraid they would leave me behind when they moved.
– Deidre
Authors Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish, in their classic book Siblings Without Rivalry, tell an oft-repeated story about a man who brings home a second wife.1 He says, ‘I love you so much that I wanted another wife … Isn’t she adorable? … We’re going to be a family now … You’ll have so much fun with her …’ Then, every stranger in the street stops the family to admire the darling new wife, while the first wife stands watching. She could be forgiven for developing some hostility. The story is a joke, but there is always truth in a good joke.
And the truth is, it’s very hard for children to share parents. After all, you only have two hands, and if they’re busy with the baby, your older child has to wait. But sibling rivalry springs from an even deeper anxiety. If he has to share scarce resources with a rival, your child’s chances of survival statistically decrease. Sure, we know there’s still enough love, food, and protection to go around. But his experience is that he’s no longer first in line to get what he needs, and that can trigger some primal terror. After all, his genes evolved in the Stone Age. On some unconscious level, he can’t help but worry. If a tiger jumps out of the bushes, which child will you save?
As parents, we know we adore our first child. That’s one of the reasons we decide to add more children to our family. But our sons and daughters can’t truly fathom our commitment to them, no matter what we say. Although they can’t articulate their fears, and they often feel genuinely nurturing towards the new baby, most older siblings worry from time to time that they’re no longer truly valued. They may even fear that, like Hansel and Gretel, they’ll be forgotten in the forest, now that you have a ‘replacement.’ And of course, younger children have their own anxieties. How could you possibly value them as much as their older sibling, who is so much better at everything, and who got to the party first?
Being aware of this primal competition clues us in to the single most important antidote to sibling rivalry. Each child must be convinced from her daily experience, that no matter what her sibling gets, there is more than enough love, attention, and appreciation for her – and that you could never love anyone more. Once children live and believe this, sibling rivalry softens, and sibling love has a chance to bloom.
Researchers have identified some specific factors that can exacerbate sibling rivalry: temperament, spacing, and gender.
As every parent of more than one child knows, each child is born with a distinct temperament. Your children’s temperaments can affect the sibling relationship in three ways:
1. Temperament matches or mismatches.2 Like adults, some children will just find it challenging to live together. We all know siblings who get on each other’s nerves because they’re so different. A quiet, sensitive child who experiences sensory overload in the face of too much activity and noise may feel overwhelmed and resentful living with an exuberant sibling who’s constantly in motion. This can also work in your favour, though, if you happen to have two rambunctious kids who can’t get enough rough and tumble together, or two dramatic kids who love playing ‘pretend’ together.
2. Adjustment to the new baby.3 Not surprisingly, research shows that children who are rated as ‘easier’ by their parents adjust more gracefully to the birth of a sibling. While they’ll still need your reassurance and one-on-one time, their panic isn’t as severe about losing so much of your attention. By contrast, children with more challenging temperaments may well become clingier, more difficult, or experience more sleep problems following the birth of a sibling.4
What’s a ‘difficult’ temperament? This is rated by the parents, so presumably any child who takes more patience on the part of the parent might be considered to have a difficult temperament. All young children need a great deal from their parents, but kids who consistently seem to need ‘more’ will feel the change in the parent-child relationship most acutely. So they feel more resentment towards their sibling, and they act out more. Luckily, attention from you will go a long way to reduce this tension. Just remember that if you have a child who tends to be more challenging, you can expect her to need lots of extra closeness with her parents to help her adapt to a new baby.
3. Sibling conflict. Children who are temperamentally more challenging for parents also find it harder to develop a positive relationship with their sibling.5 For example, research repeatedly shows that kids who are rated by their parents as more emotionally intense or more physically active are more likely to be aggressive with their younger siblings.6 In fact, children rated as highly active were found in one study to experience four times as much sibling conflict as other children.7 We can easily imagine that little Nicolas, who is always in motion, would be louder and rougher with the baby and more likely to be on the receiving end of parental frustration than his sister, Valentina, who’s naturally more quiet and gentle.
When the older child is the one with the easier temperament, research shows that he or she sets the tone and helps the younger child regulate, so the sibling relationship is smoother.8 So while a challenging child can be hard on parents regardless of birth order, the sibling relationship will be easier if the challenging child is the younger child.
The very good news is that you can make all the difference here. Researchers have found that parents who are able to keep a strong bond with their emotionally or physically intense child create ‘a protective factor to ameliorate the effect of difficult temperament on the sibling relationship.’9 That means that if you have a challenging child and you’re adding another child to your family, the most important thing you can do to encourage a positive sibling relationship is for both parents to maintain a deep, nurturing, positive relationship with your older child, both before and after the baby is born. This book will give you the support to do exactly that.
Annie has a hard time sharing me. She craves more attention and I literally can’t give it to her. They will both be crying for me several times a day and I just sit and hold both of them while they push at each other. I wanted kids close in age so they could be best friends. Now it is just a disaster.
– Sarah
How closely to space our children is a relatively new question for humans, simply because until babies began using bottles, and a surplus of food for their mothers became available, women’s bodies were unlikely to conceive again soon after a birth. So where at least three years between births seems to be the historical human norm, mothers can now conceive again quickly.
Studies on child spacing show that children who are closer in age exhibit more sibling rivalry in the form of aggressiveness and competitiveness, but they’re also more intimate.10 It makes sense that children who are closer in age will play together more, which can give them more opportunities to fight – but also to build a closer relationship. As sibling researcher Judy Dunn says, ‘Siblings who quarrel a lot and are very competitive are often quite friendly and cooperative in other ways. When they’re not fighting and arguing, these siblings play great games together and enjoy each other’s company. Could it be that they’re learning through the competitive arguments – learning something that helps them manage to play together?’11 If parents can support closely spaced siblings to resolve the fighting constructively, this closeness can set the tone for a lifetime of deep connection.
But before you set out to space your babies closely, there are some important variables to consider, factors that might compromise your ability to give your children that support to create a close sibling bond. After all, fighting doesn’t always work itself out positively, and constant competition can also set a tone for life.
What other factors should you consider? It’s an obvious fact of life that parents only have two hands and twenty-four hours in a day to divide between their children and everything else they have to do. The more children they have, the more of a challenge it is to tend to everyone’s needs. And the younger the children, the more urgent their needs. An eighteen-month-old may look a lot bigger than your newborn, but she’s still a baby herself.
Most of us assume that since our little one won’t remember the time before the baby, she’ll adapt more easily. Unfortunately, researchers now believe that experience before conscious memories are formed actually has more impact on us because those implicit memories are less subject to conscious review. As Daniel Siegel says in The Developing Mind, ‘These implicit elements form part of the foundation for our subjective sense of ourselves.’12 So the issue isn’t what she can remember. The issue is how long she can tolerate waiting to have her needs met, and what unconscious conclusions she draws about her own worth and the trustworthiness of others while she waits.
Isn’t it good for children to learn to wait, to delay gratification? Absolutely. The question is how they learn that. When a child trusts that indeed her need will be met, she can delay gratification a bit longer. So it’s true that small delays in having needs met can help a child develop trust, but that’s only true as long as her needs are then met fairly quickly. How quickly? That depends on the age of the child, and on her temperament: How fast does she move into a state of emergency when she gets upset? She may well conclude that she won’t get what she needs unless she becomes very demanding, which can create an enduring pattern. So not surprisingly, research shows that younger toddlers, compared to older toddlers, have more difficulty adjusting when new siblings are introduced to the family.13
Can you space your children close together, and still meet their needs so they flourish? Of course, and many families do. But it obviously means there will be more pressure on you to meet the needs of both children. So if you have the luxury to decide how to space your children, ask yourself some tough questions:
• How much support do you have from your partner and extended family?
• How much energy and patience do you have? Imagine the exhaustion you felt with your firstborn, except this time you’ll have another child who also needs you a great deal.
• How easy, or how challenging, is your child?
• Do you have health issues? The physical health of a baby is better if his conception is at least eighteen months after the previous baby’s birth, which is a small risk factor best not combined with other physical risk factors.14
• Are there any other significant stresses on the family? Stress has a tangible physical and emotional impact, even if we can’t quantify that impact, and close child spacing creates stress for everyone involved – both parents and kids. Too much stress makes it tough to create the close parent-child bonds you want with both children.15
Sometimes the stars line up just right and we have the luxury of making a decision about spacing our children. More often, though, life intervenes, and we don’t have control of when our blessings show up. So if your children are already spaced close together, please don’t panic. Instead, see this factor as similar to temperament and gender, which are just givens. It simply means that there will be more pressure on you, the parent, to stay patient in the face of greater demands. Your job – and it’s a big one – is to take care of yourself, so you can meet the needs of two children who are babies at the same time. That’s what allows you to develop a positive relationship with each child. And that’s the foundation that supports your children to develop a happy relationship with each other, regardless of their spacing.
If at least one of your children is a girl, your children may be closer than if you have two boys, who tend to be more competitive.16 Same-sex siblings are often close, but their relationships also include more aggression, especially when they’re young and particularly when they’re boys.17
You can’t control the sex of your baby, but there are ways to smooth out some of the tendency to compete. First, spacing your kids farther apart may lessen overt competition, because children are less likely to see themselves as competitors when they’re at a different stage of childhood.
Second, try to minimize comparisons between your children. Even though you know logically that your two sons are different people, not necessarily any more alike than a son and daughter might be, you’re more likely to compare two kids of the same sex to each other. Not surprisingly, the children themselves are also likely to see themselves as more similar – and more in competition – compared to how they would perceive their relationship with a sibling of the opposite sex.
Finally, stress each child’s individuality. This reduces competition because they don’t have to fight to be the ‘best’ boy, since they’re your only ‘Riley’ and your only ‘Dominic.’ We’ll discuss this more in Chapter 7, but for now, one easy rule is to refrain from referring to your kids as ‘the boys’ or ‘the girls.’ Why not simply use their names?
Worried that your family has one or more of these circumstances that may exacerbate sibling rivalry? It’s true that you can’t control your children’s temperaments or gender, and you often have little control over spacing. Luckily, you can control what may be the most critical factor of all – you, the parent!
Why are you the most important factor? We’ve already considered how the three practices of calm parenting – regulating your own emotions, connecting with your child, and coaching instead of controlling – help you raise siblings who can get along with each other, and are motivated to do so. We’ve also looked in depth at how emotion coaching and loving guidance discipline practices make a huge difference in the sibling relationship. Throughout this book, we’ll use this calm parenting approach to help you foster a close sibling bond between your children.
But the most important thing you can do to foster a good relationship between your children is to create a deep, nurturing bond with each child.18 Research shows that if you have a positive relationship with each of your children, they’re much more likely to have a positive relationship with each other.19 That’s true even when you have two boys (or girls) who have challenging temperaments and are very close in age. Even when one of your children has a more challenging temperament, if you can do the hard work to maintain a warm and positive relationship with your ‘high needs’ child, you’re laying the foundation for a more positive sibling relationship. In fact, you’re creating a blueprint for him to use in all future relationships.20
But how do we create those strong bonds? By the way we respond to each child’s needs, every day. Every parent-child relationship is different, depending on the contribution of both the adult and the child, who together create a ‘system’ that tends to reinforce the same responses over and over. But no matter what your child is like, you have the choice of how to respond to him. Your responses will shape your relationship with him, and to some degree will even shape your child’s brain and his way of relating to himself and to others.
Most parents think we have a good relationship with our child. After all, we know we love him. The question, though, is how close the child feels to us – especially when he’s upset.
• Does he trust that, when he feels needy or frightened, we’ll be there to help?
• Does he trust that when he’s angry, it’s safe to show us, and we’ll respond with understanding, so that he can reveal the tears and fears driving his anger?
• Does he trust that we value him exactly as he is, that we aren’t trying to change him, or worrying about how he reflects on us?
• Does he trust that we’ll understand if he makes mistakes and coach him to do better, or does he worry that we’ll see him as behaving badly and punish him?
• Does he trust that we’ll manage our own anxiety so that we can coach him when he’s frustrated or struggling to master something, rather than stepping in to take over?
The closer our relationship with each child, the more trust there is, and the more that child is able to use us as his safe haven. This security is what allows a child to thrive, so that he can be emotionally generous towards others, including siblings.
Throughout this book, you’ll find a focus on connection, along with specific actions you can take to sweeten and deepen your relationship with each child. Your goal is both to find more opportunities for positive interactions with each child, and to minimize the negative ones that erode trust – and to repair them when they inevitably occur.
(For more support to build a closer bond with your child, please see Part 2 of Calm Parents, Happy Kids.)