THREE
The Outbreak of Hostilities
Why Siblings Fight and What to Do About It
I knew enough not to tangle with Steve. As older brothers went, he was not especially menacing. He liked to read; he liked to write; he loved listening to music and could get lost for hours in my mother’s collection of Broadway soundtracks. He was breathtakingly bad at sports—the kind of bad that rises almost to the level of performance art—and his lack of agility made him equally bad at anything approaching physical combat. I saw him angry plenty of times, but I never once saw him throw a punch at a friend or a schoolmate—as much because of any innate pacifism, I always assumed, as because he simply had no idea how to do it effectively.
All the same, he was an older brother, with all of the authority and capacity for menace that that implied. He could tease mercilessly, he could provoke diabolically. He was bigger and stronger than I was, and even with his limited pugilistic skills, he was not above the leap-andpummel strategy older siblings routinely use to keep younger ones in line. To that extent, I was intimidated by Steve—at least until the day I decided to take a stand. It was a strip of balsa wood that gave me my chance.
Woodworking was never much taught or valued in my family. My father was good with his hands, but in the precise and pointillist way of, say, a jeweler or a fly-fisherman. He could assemble a model solar system in a cardboard box that was accurate down to the Saturnian moonlets, but hanging a door or building a bookshelf was another matter entirely. When my father did finally decide to work in wood, it was thus no surprise that balsa wood was his medium of choice. Sold in sheets and planks—to the degree that anything that was three feet long and less than a quarter of an inch thick can be fairly called a plank—it could be cut with heavy scissors instead of a saw and pieced together with straight pins instead of nails. Still, the stuff had strength and it had twang and I took special pleasure in watching my father build a lovely—and perfectly useless—birdhouse with it, one that was fine on a mantel but would not have survived half a day in an actual tree with an actual bird. Steve and I decided we’d like to work with balsa wood, too, and my father bought us some, which we stored under Steve’s bed when we weren’t using it.
One night, not long before going to sleep, I was playing on the floor of our room when Steve returned, having just taken a bath. He dropped his towel to put on his pajamas and I looked up to see my older brother’s bum a few feet in front of me. I was six, Steve was eight, and in all the years of a shared bedroom and shared baths, I’d seen his rear almost as much as I’d seen his face. But it had never been positioned just so before—and certainly never with a light, springy, whip-cracking strip of balsa wood just within reach of my right hand.
I loved Steve; I admired and even feared Steve. More to the point, I respected him—and not just him but his office. He was the oldest of the four of us, and that entitled him to deference. And yet his butt, the balsa wood, and a fleeting moment of opportunity had come together in front of me—a moment needing only courage on my part. That perfect convergence would, I knew, vanish in an instant. In a great flash of carpe diem folly, I whipped my hand under the bed, grabbed the wood, hitched back my arm, and swung.
What I remember most about that moment was the wonderful thwacking sound that followed the swing—a sound that, no doubt, has been embellished by the years. I remember, too, Steve wheeling around, locking his eyes on mine, and in a fraternal flash sending me a complex, unspoken message. He was astonished by what I’d done and—truth be told—he was a little impressed by it. “You’ve got moxie,” his expression said, “but you’re going to have to pay for it.” My return look, I suspect, conveyed just two words: “Of course.”
I covered up and Steve attacked, administering a harmless if humbling pounding perfectly suited to my crime. With that, the natural hierarchy was restored. I was reminded of the primacy of his position—but he was reminded that more and more he’d be called upon to defend it. It was one of a thousand such balance-of-power maneuvers we’d already traded in our years together—and it was one of thousands more still to come. And that was precisely how things were supposed to be.
It’s no surprise that families are fantastically complicated things—a scrum of people and personalities crowded together under a single roof for eighteen or twenty years and expected to get along there. By some measures, it’s a wonder they survive six months. Even that, however, doesn’t quite capture all the complexity at play. Most of the time, we think of a family as a single emotional organism—a mom and a dad and a group of children, moving and acting as a mass. But there are a lot more people—or, more specifically, a lot more relationships—in any one household than you think.
Every individual in your family has a separate, one-on-one relationship with every other individual, each of those relationships representing a discrete, stand-alone pairing. All families are made of many such pairs—or dyads—and just how many of them there are in a single home is a matter of simple arithmetic. Psychologist Jennifer Jenkins of the University of Toronto begins many of her studies of family dynamics with a statistical device called a correlation matrix. The formula seems opaque:
But it’s actually a very simple thing, with k standing for the number of people in a family and x for the number of dyads. If your family has 3 children and 2 parents, that means there are 10 one-on-one relationships playing out at any one time. Dad has his own relationship with each child, Mom has her own, and Mom and Dad have the marital bond. Add to that the relationship between child number one and two, child number two and three, and child number three and one. In a 4-sibling, 2-parent family there are 15 such dyads. The 6-child Brady Bunch had 28; the original Kennedy clan, with 9 children, had 55; and Bobby Kennedy, who grew up to have 11 children of his own, had a household with a whopping 91 dyads.
Every such pairing in any one family has strengths, intimacies, and challenges that are peculiar to it, and this is particularly so in the case of siblings. The relationship between, say, two middle-born sisters will be very different from that between a firstborn son and a second-born son, a firstborn girl and a fourth-born girl, and on and on. “We used to think of families as a kind of unified environment,” says Frank Sulloway, psychologist, science historian, and author of Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives. “But your relationship with any other family member is different from your sibling’s relationship with that same member. It’s different because you have a different history. You can almost argue that there is no such thing as a shared environment; the family is instead a series of micro-environments.”
As with all environments, each of these can develop its own climate and ecology, and this is particularly so when it comes to the onset of storms. Parents who are asked how often their children fight will predictably answer with exasperated absolutes: “Constantly,” they’ll say. “When do they not fight?” Unscientific as these responses are, the fact is, they’re surprisingly accurate. Indeed, parents who lament what seems to be the almost hourly outbreak of hostilities in the playroom may actually be lowballing things.
Psychologist Laurie Kramer, who, in addition to her teaching work at the University of Illinois, directs research at the school’s Family Resiliency Center, was among the first to try to put a hard number on just how often siblings fight, visiting homes and observing brothers and sisters at play. With the cooperation and connivance of the parents, she has concealed microphones in kids’ bedrooms—or even on an article of their clothing—and retreated to another part of the house to listen in as they go about the complicated business of growing up together. The results surprised her.
During a forty-five-minute play session, Kramer found that the average pair of children in the three- to seven-year-old age group engage in more than 2.5 conflicts. That factors out to 3.5 every hour, or one every seventeen minutes. And by conflict, Kramer doesn’t mean a single-volley remark or an aggressive physical bump that goes unanswered. She means extended conflict—at least three sequential hostile exchanges. When you add the smaller pokes and provocations, the count climbs even higher. A related study by psychologists Michal Perlman of the University of Toronto and Hildy Ross of the University of Waterloo focused on sibs from two to four years old and found that in that age group, hostilities break out an astonishing 6.3 times per hour—or one fight every 9.5 minutes. A well-regarded study from as long ago as 1980 found that fully 82 percent of siblings had engaged in some form of physical violence against a brother or sister in the course of the preceding year, and that 40 percent had hit a sib with an object of some kind.
Bradley McKay, twelve, and his brother Pete, nine, are growing up on Chicago’s North Side, and have successfully achieved something of an interpersonal trifecta when it comes to fighting: They’re siblings, they’re boys, and they’re close in age. Pete estimates that he fights with Bradley about two-thirds of the time they’re together—which fits comfortably inside the range Perlman, Ross, and Kramer observed. Their mother, Donna, marvels at how little it can take to spark hostilities. “They fight about almost everything,” she says.
The bill of particulars Pete cites against his brother confirms that. “Whenever I get the remote first, he screams and tells me to change the channel,” he says. “He seems to call me stupid and fat for no reason. And when we play board games, he accuses me of cheating when I’m about to win. Once he pulled my tongue. I get hurt a lot.” Bradley, not surprisingly, denies the charges: “Anything he says about me, if it isn’t positive, is a filthy lie.”
The McKay boys are hardly alone in finding nearly any grievance a sufficient reason to fight. When I was a child, Steve and I almost came to blows because he inexplicably wanted to name a new stuffed puppy he’d been given “Brittany”—a name he no doubt overheard from TV or an adult conversation, and one I considered far too snooty for any plush toy that was going to live in our room. When Larry Stone, now a national baseball reporter for the Seattle Times, was small, his older sister knew she could elicit a reaction simply by fixing her eyes on him during dinner and refusing to look away. “Mom,” he’d cry, “Esther’s gazing at me!”
For all these everyday provocations, however, the most common casus belli among siblings is property. Small children have almost no control over their world, and what little they do have concerns their possessions. They understand early on that toys that are presented to them belong to them, and while kids are perfectly willing to encroach on the property rights of another, they can’t abide someone else trespassing on theirs. “In one of my papers,” says Catherine Salmon, of the University of Redlands, “we found that 95 percent of younger siblings and 93 percent of older siblings mentioned that the taking of property was a major problem in their relationship. It’s a very important part of the development of personal identity—the idea of ‘What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is yours.’”
Hildy Ross has conducted longer-term studies of children in the two-to-four age group and then returned to observe the same kids when they’re four to six, and for all the maturing that goes on in that critical span, she has found that they barely budge when it comes to the fierce assertion of control over their own belongings. Actual violence in the defense of property—the toddler with a toy who is approached to share it and instead clunks the other child on the head with it—might diminish with age, but defending what’s theirs by other means doesn’t.
Yet the very sensitivity to property rights that drives so much conflict also carries the seeds to its solution. Encouragingly, studies by Ross and others have shown that even without the intervention of a parent, when a battle over property breaks out and is successfully resolved, the settlement usually favors the rightful owner—almost as if the encroaching sibling feels innately wrong and is more inclined to back down than the aggrieved sibling. That’s not the case all the time, of course, and Ross concedes that it helps a lot when the rightful owner also happens to be the older child. But older or younger, the owner wins far more times than would be explained simply by chance.
Close behind property as a trigger for sibling war making is the general concept of fairness. The English language is filled with idioms expressing this simple ideal: We seek a square deal, a level playing field, a fair shake. Things get divided even steven, fifty-fifty. We exhort one another to stick to a bargain, to do the right thing. That’s a whole lot of vocabulary for so straight-up a concept, and it’s a measure, perhaps, of how deeply rooted fairness is in our DNA. Research conducted by numerous scientists, including Samuel Bowles, a professor of economics at the University of Siena and a faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute, has shown that the part of the brain that lights up when we encounter something we consider unfair is the same that lights up when we feel disgust—meaning we recoil from the very idea of inequity in the same way we recoil from a rotten egg or putrefied meat. And this is not a concept that arose late in human development; it’s the brain’s insula that is the seat of disgust, a deeply buried region far below our vaunted—and comparatively modern—cerebral cortex. Human impulses don’t get much more primally encoded than that, and this same sense of equity may have played a key role in the formation of civil society itself.
In 1971, sociobiologist Robert Trivers of Harvard coined the term “reciprocal altruism” to describe the bilateral flow of goods and favors that undergirds any social system. Primitive humans who shared their food when their neighbors had none would have been a lot less inclined to do so if they weren’t reasonably sure their neighbors would provide for them when they were wanting. The man who lends his hammer to a neighbor today does so with the unspoken expectation that he can come asking to borrow a ladder tomorrow. Without that understanding, the original favor would never be performed—and a cooperative culture wouldn’t coalesce. We may not like assigning such cool and reductionist motives to so sublime a concept as human generosity, but it’s an inescapable part of what drives us all.
This is no less true in the home, but here a small child’s sense of what’s fair and what’s not goes beyond the favor-for-favor, good-deedfor-good-deed arrangement of reciprocal altruism, extending to pretty much any transaction at all that involves a brother or sister. The cupcake must be cut precisely in half or the child who got stiffed will howl. An 8:00 p.m. bedtime is perfectly all right with one sibling unless the other sib gets 8:15—in which case a grave injustice has been done. Birthday presents, weekly allowances, tooth fairy money—all get counted up and compared. Often, the very idea that something inequitable is taking place is far more important than the substance of that something. The cupcake grievance may have some merit, since every quarter-inch that gets added to Child A’s half must, by definition, be subtracted from Child B’s. But the little brother with the 8:00 p.m. bedtime did not have to give up fifteen minutes in order for his big brother to stay up till 8:15. When sibs grow up, they may realize the fundamental pointlessness of these arguments on principle, but when they’re children, the issues seem very, very real.
Wynne Wong-Cheng, a thirty-four-year-old elementary school psychologist living in Van Nuys, California, remembers how her big sister, Wileen Wong, now thirty-six, would lean on their mother to be stricter with Wynne—even though the way their parents treated one sister had no real impact on the other. “I got away with things with my parents, and I know that upset Wileen,” Wynne says. “Even with little chores my parents asked us to do, I didn’t have to follow through on them. Also, I was a picky eater and she wasn’t, so even though our parents tried to make us eat everything on our plates, I didn’t have to. Wileen was always reminding Mom to set limits on me, but I knew how to work it. So she would say to my mom, ‘It’s not fair that she gets away with these things.’ ”
Young siblings can—and should—be forgiven some of this behavior, since the hard fact is that they’re not capable of much else. Fairness is a complicated concept, and children are limited in their understanding of it, applying it bluntly, broadly, and without exceptions. “Siblings tell their parents about something that the sibling has done wrong—she is talking with her mouth full, she spilled her milk,” says Hildy Ross, “things that don’t really affect the child’s own well-being, but enforce the family rules.”
Ultimately kids do start to learn that fairness is a more flexible concept than that—that there’s plain fairness and situational fairness. A first-grader may get angry when he comes home from school and finds that his big sister, who was sick and had to stay in bed, got to watch cartoons all day. By third grade, he may still grumble, but he’ll also understand that the circumstances of the day mitigate the perceived injustice. That transition from “Unfair!” to “Unfair, however . . .” may not seem like much, but it’s a big developmental step—one that parents eagerly wait for their kids to take.
Squalls that break out over fair dealing or toy sharing are tolerable, if maddening, but things get a lot more serious when screaming turns to physical fighting. Psychologists and family experts are not speaking lightly when they call sibling relationships the most abusive in most families, all the more so in an era in which spankings and other kinds of corporal punishment that parents once imposed are increasingly understood to be a mistake, and have become far less socially acceptable in any event. That often leaves kids as the only hitters in the house, and studies as far back as 1980 have consistently found fights between siblings to be the most common type of family violence.
“I did a longitudinal study of adolescent siblings once,” says psychologist Lew Bank, of the Oregon Social Learning Center. “I thought it would be interesting to ask a group of younger siblings—who were on average about sixteen years old—what’s the best thing your sibling ever did with you and what’s the worst thing. We had to stop asking the question in the first week of the study because there were so many reports of assault and even rape. It was a high-risk group of kids, but still.”
Clearly, even the worst sibling relationships rarely take so dark a turn, but the mere fact that the capacity for such ugliness exists is a reminder of the powerful feelings that can be at play. The first thing parents need to do when faced with brawling kids is to determine what’s a real fight and what isn’t. A lot of sibling wrestling and hitting is just a form of kabuki combat designed to test limits and recalibrate the balance of power—the very thing that motivated my balsa-wood whack and the pummeling that followed. Psychologist Eleanor Maccoby of Stanford University has written extensively about the value of what she labels rough-and-tumble play, a form of relatively harmless hitting, shoving and wrestling that takes place among all children, but particularly among boys. In most cases, the point of the sparring is to gauge the other boy’s strength and willingness to fight.
My brothers and I routinely made nighttime trips to the emergency room for stitches or splints that resulted from too-rough games gone painfully awry. In the era when we were growing up, our appearances in the hospital were met with rolls of the eyes or even a smile as a nurse would check her chart to see how frequent our regular visits had become. Today, the nurse’s eyes would narrow instead, and a call would surely be made to child protective services to make certain that all the bloodshed wasn’t a product of parental neglect or abuse. But if the era has changed, the nature of boys hasn’t, and when my extended family recently met in an otherwise orderly restaurant in Los Angeles for a too-rare gathering of the clan, it was no surprise when no sooner had we arrived than two of my nephews—brothers aged five and three—dropped to the floor, wrestling. The parental cries of “It won’t seem like so much fun when one of you gets hurt” as they pulled the boys apart were exactly the same as they were when I was little, and the risk of injury was exactly as great. But as in the past as well, both parents had a pretty good idea of what was behind the brawling—and it clearly wasn’t hostility.
Among sibs, this probing for weaknesses starts even earlier than the three-to-five age group. Part of the purpose of Ross’s study of small children at two-year intervals was to determine how firmly fixed dominance patterns are and what it takes to change them. In one experiment in 1994, she observed a sample group of two- to four-year-olds, noting which ones were aggressors and which were conciliators. Typically, it was the older siblings who threw their weight around and the younger ones who tolerated it. Ross returned in 1996 and observed the same subjects, looking to see if their dynamic had changed. Significantly, she found that aggressive older siblings remained aggressive as long as the younger sibs accepted that that was the natural order of things. In the relative handful of relationships in which the younger sib pushed back, the older sib usually chose not to push harder but instead to retreat a bit. The relationship became less hierarchical, if never one of true equals. “If the second-born stood up for himself,” Ross says, “the aggressor stood down.”
Real fights fueled by real anger do break out, of course, and even the most benign rough-and-tumble does operate on the knife edge of trouble. One way to distinguish the difference is what happens not when the weaker—usually younger—party pushes back, but instead signals surrender. If the hostilities immediately break off, the fight was probably harmless. If the aggressor persists, any rough-and-tumble deal that did exist has been broken and something more is going on. Parents may not always be able to see where the line exists in any particular bout, but the sibs themselves do.
“Children recognize the difference and get angry if the boundary is crossed,” writes child expert Judith Harris. “After a bout of rough-and-tumble play, children continue to play together. After an aggressive encounter, they go their separate ways.”
Brother-on-brother brawls may be the most common form of sibling combat, but that’s not to say that fights of the sister-sister or sister-brother kind don’t play out, too, sometimes with equal ferocity. Among the three possible sibling gender pairings—boy-boy, girl-girl, and girl-boy—it’s actually the girl-boy matchup that includes the most physical provocation, though with overwhelming frequency it’s directed at the sister by the brother, and just as much so when the boy is the younger of the two. Older brothers—whether by natural inclination, social training, or both—usually go easier on little sisters. Little brothers are not so constrained, which makes it a good thing that they’re also not very powerful. Physical fighting between younger brothers and older sisters may break out often, but it rarely lasts long, both because the sister does not have much interest in it and because she has the size and strength to stiff-arm her attacker away. To the extent that a big sister does rise to the combat bait, she often does so creatively.
Actor Jake Gyllenhaal was once asked if his big sister, Maggie, also a Hollywood star, ever beat him up. His answer: “Depends on what you call beating up. She performed the musical Cats for our parents and she made me lick milk from a bowl while she sang, which was, in a way, abuse.”
Much worse than sister-brother fighting is sister-sister, and it can carry a special edge. Among boys, strength and size are pretty much everything. Among girls, things are subtler. Before the blows, there are usually words, and those words can cut. There’s a lot of truth to the stereotype that girls are generally better at intimacy skills than boys are, and parents and teachers observe that fact every day. During a parentteacher-student classroom party when my daughter Elisa was in second grade, she clunked her head on something and wailed inconsolably for a minute or two. As I comforted her, I noticed two of her friends—both girls—hovering a few feet away, unseen by Elisa. Their hands were knitted worriedly and their faces crinkled with empathic pain. It was sweet and real—and it was wholly outside of my boyhood experience. I got clocked by something and cried plenty of times when I was Elisa’s age, and if any of my male peers were even aware of it—much less worried about it—I surely didn’t notice.
But there’s also a downside to what girls share. Boys, even brothers, may never get to know one another at the deep and granular level at which their private fears and closely guarded vulnerabilities are held, but girls exchange those secrets readily, and often use that openness to build shared trust. Sometimes, however, they exploit that intimacy. The more knowledge you have about the other girl, after all, the more you can turn it back on her when you’re angry. “Because girls know each other so well,” says developmental psychologist Judith Dunn, of King’s College in London, “they can be devastating teasers and bulliers. They know just what upsets the other.”
Indeed, I saw that same flip side of empathy play out in a very dramatic way in 2008 between Elisa, who was seven at the time, and our then-five-year-old Paloma. That year, a construction crane collapsed near Second Avenue in New York City, killing seven people and crushing a midtown brownstone. I, my wife, and Paloma happened to be on the other side of the avenue when it occurred. The sound was deafening, and the sight of the crane tipping forward and destroying the house was horrific. Worse for those standing nearby was the sudden stampede of people running from the scene as a smell of leaking gas rose from the rubble—a stampede in which we quickly found ourselves. I scooped up Paloma so that she wouldn’t get trampled underfoot, and we all raced along as fast as we could until we made it clear of danger.
The experience, not surprisingly, stayed with Paloma and for weeks afterward caused her no shortage of sleepless nights. She confided in Elisa—who was in a weekend class at the time and missed the drama—that she could not get the thought of cranes out of her head. Elisa listened to and consoled her little sister and was a source of true comfort. Yet when the girls found themselves in an argument over the course of the following days, she would sometimes tease her by finding a way to work the word “crane” into the conversation. When my wife and I would reprimand her, she’d innocently insist that she meant the bird, not the machine. More than once, Elisa’s needling led Paloma to take a swing at her—and a shoving, hair-pulling fight would break out. Such gratuitous taunting, of course, is hardly gender specific, and brothers are capable of the same unpleasantness. But a boy who was troubled by something like Paloma was would also be more inclined to suck it up, tough it out, and never mention it out loud. If you don’t expose your vulnerable neck, no one’s ever going to bite it.
Certainly, when girls are older, they’re more empathic than they are at seven, and a sister who witnessed a tragedy the way Paloma did would get only sympathy from the other sister. But during the course of an argument, it’s less certain that the same two girls wouldn’t find other, subtler weak spots to exploit—a boyfriend problem, an academic setback, even a body-image issue—and that things couldn’t then turn physical all over again. “The studies of physical fighting between kids that are based on playgrounds talk about boys’ aggression and minimize girls’,” says Dunn. “But that is not so when you look at girls who also happen to be sisters. In those cases, they can be incredibly aggressive physically—and that aggression is exhibited in a way that isn’t typically described for girls.”
If sibs come factory-loaded for fighting, they come equally well equipped with an impressive set of peacemaking skills. That’s critical both for their emotional development and for the maintenance of their relationship—to say nothing of the sanity of their parents. Not only can’t Mom and Dad forever be brokering cease-fires among the siblings, their efforts may not even be worth all that much: Peace imposed from the outside is never as lasting as the kind that’s hammered out between the parties themselves. It’s not always easy to spot the tools sibs use to settle their disputes, particularly since they’re usually subtler than the ones they use to wage war. In 2009, psychologists Holly Recchia and Nina Howe, both then at Concordia University in Montreal, conducted a multipart study designed to look more closely at this aspect of the sibling dynamic.
Recchia and Howe recruited a sample group of several dozen sibling pairs and then divided them into three age groups: four to seven, six to eight, and seven to ten. In the first part of the study, they instructed forty-five of the pairs to select a recurring conflict in their relationship and gave them ten minutes to sort it out. A discreetly placed video camera recorded their conversations, but otherwise the kids were left entirely alone. This, of course, could be a prescription for a full-blown war, but the kids did much better than expected.
The average negotiation lasted just two minutes and four seconds before the siblings emerged and announced they’d resolved their differences. Of the forty-five pairs, twenty-nine reached a solution that the researchers termed a compromise—the gold standard of conflict resolution, with both parties giving up something and both getting something in return. Ten reached an agreement that was a straight-up win-lose arrangement—a zero-sum settlement in which one sibling prevailed completely, but to which both sibs at least agreed. Only four were termed a standoff, with no agreement at all reached. And only two were what the researchers decorously labeled “unproductive,” and what parents would label “a meltdown.”
Certainly, the way kids behave in the controlled setting of the laboratory with a flock of scientists hovering outside the door is very different from the way they behave in the free-fire zone of the playroom, and any number of them might have reached an agreement only because they knew the grown-ups expected them to. This is a version of what’s known as the Hawthorne effect, named for industrial experiments conducted at the Hawthorne Works manufacturing plant outside of Chicago in 1924. In those studies, researchers wanted to determine how various levels of light affect employee efficiency, but the results proved useless. The workers improved their performance during the studies—seeming to validate the methods being tested—but as soon as the experimenters left, productivity returned to what it had been. The boost in performance was not in response to the improved work setting, but to the mere presence of the observers.
Recchia and Howe were mindful of the Hawthorne effect and concede that it may have played a role in their research. But what they were most interested in was not whether the kids they observed reached a resolution, but how they reached it. That was the real variable measured in the study, and that was much less likely to be influenced by the presence of the scientists. The techniques the siblings used, the researchers found, were often dependent largely on their age.
The older the kids were, the more inclined they were not just to make their arguments, but to provide justifications for them. As with kids’ understanding of conditional fairness, the difference between “I want this toy” and “I want this toy because . . .” is a very big one. The sooner that at least one sibling learns it, the more rational the arguments are likely to be. Kids in the older end of the study group were also better at generalizing their resolution beyond the immediate conflict and applying it to future ones that might come up. Children do this all the time when they’re playing—inventing bits of a game on the fly and codifying it with the declaration, “From now on, the rule is . . .” Applied to in-family arguments, that same skill goes a long way toward avoiding the Groundhog Day phenomenon that occurs when the same fight comes up again and again. Build up a body of such laws and before long you’ve got a sort of ad hoc civil code.
The problem with such age-specific skills, of course, is that often—indeed, most of the time—children are arguing back and forth across developmental lines. The older child who’s learned the art of justification and rule generalization must try to reach a resolution with a younger child who’s nowhere near that point. And the younger child must try to make a case with an arsenal of argumentation weapons far less sophisticated than the older one’s. Yet many of the siblings in the study proved adept at adjusting to this disparity, calibrating their arguments to the age and maturity level of the other. A child in the middle group—the sixto-eight category, for example—was more likely to use justifications and explanations when bargaining up to a sibling in the seven-to-ten group than down to a younger sib in the four-to-seven group. “Siblings may be more motivated to express their point of view if they think the listener will understand and benefit from it than when they will not,” the researchers wrote.
With such instinctive abilities to feel their way to peaceful play, kids often do not need their parents’ sometimes clumsy intervention. But that’s not to say it’s a good idea to go too far in the leave-them-be direction, and not just in order to prevent someone from getting killed. A venerable—if questionable—bit of child-rearing wisdom is that some arguments between siblings are staged mostly to get the grown-ups’ attention. In the constant competition to stand out in the brood, there is nothing like being wronged by a brother or sister and then having a parent side with you to give you a temporary edge. With that in mind, when a conflict breaks out, some child-care experts argue that a parent may be smart not to take the bait and instead to let the kids sort things out on their own.
Maybe. But parents do need to take a more selective approach, always looking closely at what the conflict is about and just which siblings are involved. Not only will this prevent a younger, weaker child from getting pounded by an older, bigger sibling should the fight spin out of control, but it can also help kids who do have some peacemaking skills to use them more effectively.
The second part of Recchia and Howe’s two-step study involved telling the same sets of siblings to address another conflict that regularly occurs in their relationship, but this time with a parent acting as mediator. Once again, the kids were given ten minutes to wrestle with the problem and come up with some resolution. With an adult in the room, it took longer to reach a consensus, with the average time of negotiation more than doubling—from two minutes and four seconds to five minutes and twenty seconds. Some of the additional time was, no doubt, consumed by the parents themselves. Moms and dads are notoriously verbal in their dealings with their kids, with lots and lots of counsel to dispense—some of it worthwhile, some of it not, but all of it time consuming. In this phase of the experiment, however, the kids themselves also seemed to be doing more talking—and, significantly, more thinking.
With the guidance of a parent, the siblings were able to reach compromise slightly more often—32 times compared to 29. The less desirable win-lose solution (with one child getting everything and the other getting nothing) occurred only 6 times in the presence of an adult compared to 13 times when the sibs were on their own. There were 11 standoffs in the just-kids negotiations, compared to 7 with a parental arbitrator.
When the researchers looked deeper into their results, they found additional reasons to be pleased. With parents present, the siblings were also better able to maintain a present- and future-oriented focus rather than relitigating past battles—the “You always get the toy!” phenomenon. The parents also showed an instinctive sense for how not to get pulled into an argument at the children’s level. When one sibling would complain, “That’s not fair,” the most common parental response in the study was “You both think it’s not fair,” or some variation on that idea. A child who feels wronged is not generally inclined to consider that the other child feels the same way, and while a parent pointing out that fact is hardly guaranteed to make an impression, in the absence of the parent, the observation never gets made at all.
Most important, on those occasions when a compromise or some other solution was entirely impossible, the parents in the study at least served as a safety net. Those who were ultimately forced to take sides almost always did so on behalf of the child in the weaker negotiating position. Typically that was the younger child, but sometimes it wasn’t, as a comparatively passive big sib can sometimes be overwhelmed by a comparatively aggressive little one.
The parents in the study were no more immune to the subtle hand of the Hawthorne effect than were the kids, of course—indeed, they might have been even more susceptible to it, since adults are far likelier than kids to know what good behavior looks like and to mimic it for the benefit of an observer. But the mere fact that they did know that—that when they were forced to think about the most effective responses to their kids’ fights they made the right choices—suggests that more rather than less parental intervention can be helpful in the home.
Children—by their age, nature, and lack of life experience—will always be domestic anarchists, though the older they get, the more civilized they become. That’s a fact that moms and dads—long since socialized into the ways of conflict avoidance and peaceful resolution—often forget. There is genuine wonder in the voice of a parent who asks, “What did you think would happen when you touched his toy?” or “Why must you always tease her when you know she gets upset?” But the thing is, the child often didn’t think in the first case and truly doesn’t know in the second. If children needed as long to learn, say, the concept of gravity as they do to learn how to get along with their brothers and sisters, no amount of Mom or Dad pleading “but you know that egg will break if you drop it” would suddenly give them a full understanding of Newtonian physics.
In the laboratory of sibling relations, brothers and sisters do come to learn up from down—that fights can be negotiated and regulated and eventually avoided altogether. And parents do have the power to facilitate that learning—at least some. And in the years it takes for the kids to acquire the skills they need, Mom and Dad can take at least some comfort from knowing that along with the learning can also come a measure of gentleness, empathy, and deeper familial love.
“Competition and conflict will always happen,” says Shirley McGuire, associate professor of psychology at the University of San Francisco. But, she promises, “warmth, cooperation, and trust will happen, too.” That goal may sometimes seem elusive, but it’s one that’s manifestly worth pursuing all the same.