Siblings provide a sort of testing ground for working out disagreements, lessons that can be applied later to negotiating differences with peers. Parents have an important role in helping children learn to work out their differences.
It is important for children to learn how to work out their differences; they can not do this when parents get involved. Even if a parent has a great ideas about how the kids can solve their problem, the parent’s idea deprive the kids of the chance to come up with their own.
Of course that does not mean the parent should never get involved. If there is an issue of physical safety, the parent needs to intervene.
So how do parents respond if, in the middle of a conflict, one of the children tries to drag the parent into it? Often the younger or more submissive child will turn to the parent as a way to even the playing field with the older or more dominant sibling. Although it is hard to refuse these pleas for assistance, parents are encouraged to try to stay on the sidelines. It is better to help the child think of ways they can negotiate the situation than to take over negotiations.
It is much harder not to intervene when one child consistently dominates and wins and the other child submits and loses. But if a parent tries to make things right for the loser, it often makes matter worse. The more parent intervenes on behalf of the victimized child, the more the parent inadvertently strengthens the aggressive sibling’s conviction that the other child is favoured. Children are competing for the same pool of resources: the love and affection of parents. No parent can stop that because it is built into the relationship. The older sibling often feels “things were pretty good around here until ‘he’ came along”.
Families tend to repeat patterns from one generation to the next. Certain aspects of siblings rivalry seem to be handed down from generation to generation. It is hard not to be upset by one of your children bullying another when it strips up memories of the parent’s childhood conflicts. It is also disturbing to think that children are repeating a family pattern, whether the parent’s feel guilty for having been the bully or resentment about being the victim. In theses cases, one of the best ways to alter the pattern is come to terms with negative feelings from the parent’s childhood by re-examining old relationships and making peace with the past. This will make it easier for the parent to intervene in constructive ways with the children.
There two ways that a parent can influence children conflicts.
- Parent can talk with children individually or together in a setting removed from the conflict. Then talk about the problems that the parent had with their siblings, rather than the child’s current difficulties. While children may not be ready at this stage to benefit from the parent’s specific suggestions, they will benefit immediately from the parent empathy and emotional support.
- Parent can model good ways to resolve conflicts when the parent handle their own disagreements with others.
Competition for love and attention:
Each child wants to feel recognized and cared for. This is frustrating for parents to accept, when their whole day has been devoted to precisely this goal. Unfortunately, each child is focused on the myriad little ways that his sibling got more attention. Despite parent’s best efforts, they can not treat two very different human beings exactly the same.
Humour is one of the most effective ways to cope with sibling competition. The very qualities that make the rivalry so exasperating and outrageous also make it comical. As parents understand sibling competition, see it as normal, and practice dealing with it through a combination of humour and respect for children’s needs, the conflicts become easier to defuse.
He Said, She said ….
First, resist assigning roles of victims or bullies to children. When a caregiver has not witnessed the events leading up to a confrontation, he must resist the temptation to respond to the most dramatic or even the most vulnerable child. Even if there is good evidence from the past supporting such assignments, this evidence is from brief period in the child’s life; labelling a child increases the odds that the role will evolve into a lifelong pattern.
Second, listen to both sides of the story. Often parents feel they know how the fight began or even who’s to blame, based on past patterns or on partial knowledge of the facts. Also children’s reporting of events in these situations is often based more on emotion than on fact.
Even if the current situation is a carbon copy of its predecessors, and even if parents have all the facts, parents should listen to both sides of the story. This not only teches children about fairness and respect, it also decreases the odds that once child will feel picked on by the parent. Moreover, knowledge of the facts is not the same as understanding the feelings and thoughts of each child. Parents need that understanding if they are going to be helpful to their children.
Third, it is critical to acknowledge the feelings of both siblings. This is hard, particularly if the parent just watched one child assault another. The parent should wait until they had the chance to process their own anger before they talk to their children. If the parent is very angry, they probably cannot listen and they almost certainly cannot acknowledge each child’s feelings. Also they can not engage in healthy discussion in the midst of pandemonium. If either child is still very upset, the conversation must be postponed until all parties calm down.
It is also important to a parent to keep clear the distinction between acknowledging feelings and accepting behaviour. Telling the child that you understand that she is angry, and that you see how what happened made her want to hurt her sister, in no way gives the child permission to physically act on that anger and hit her sister. In fact, if children’s feelings are expressed and acknowledged, not only do they feel better, but they then have the opportunity to explore with the parent a non-violent alternative ways to handle the conflict.