Category: Siblings
Posted by Dr. Daniel Klein on Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 06:35 AMGet out of jury duty when siblings fight
"All rise in the court. The case over who had the remote control first will be heard. The Honorable Mother is now presiding."
How many times do you feel like you are asked to be judge and jury for your children's conflict? "He hit me first!" or "She took my toy and won't give it back." Parents tell me every week how their patience has run out or they are just out of energy. Unless you like the role of constantly being a judge and jury, I want to try to set you free.
There is no one reason for why siblings fight. In general, a great deal of sibling rivalry is about competition for parental attention. Other contributing factors include different temperaments, less developed problem solving skills, poor frustration tolerance in one of the children and jealousy.
What I often suggest is taking a threefold approach to sibling fighting:
- The first part is to ignore the behavior when ever possible and send the message you are not going to get involved. This forces the problem back to the children and removes the reinforcement for attention seeking that is the basis of much of their behavior. The exception would be if one sibling is hurting the other one. In this case, a strong message about the expectation of safety should be given.
- Secondly, if you do get involved try not to take sides. In effect, you should not be the judge. Kids will sometimes respond, "it's not fair." In these cases we can be empathic with the child, but we want to stay away from the dynamic of trying to figure out who did what. Instead, we can send the message that you are available to help the kids get along better when they are calm.
- Lastly, if the conflict continues, the children lose the right to be together. This can be a short time period or longer. Many times we find as soon as we separate the kids, they want to come back together.
Other ideas are to work on problem solving and conflict resolution with the siblings. This approach best works when they are removed from the heat of the situation. For example, you could hold a family meeting that begins with you saying, "I'm noticing the two of you are fighting over the television program almost everyday. Let's figure out what the problem might be and how we can work on getting along better." From there, you can work with the children to define the problem, identify possible choices and try one out. Put the ideas in writing as a contract and review in a day or two. Often, the ideas are a work in progress but the process of problem solving can help develop or strengthen coping skills.
Sometimes, working with each child on assertiveness can be helpful as well. I try to instruct kids to speak up to protect themselves or get their needs met. For example, we can teach the child to tell his sibling he will not be around her if he is being mistreated. If the sibling won't leave the other alone, he can tell an adult something to the effect of "I am trying to be by myself right now so I can feel safe and I'm having a hard time" or "I need help getting along better with my sister."
Some of my favorite books on sibling rivalry include Dr. Charles Fay's "Love and Logic" and Dr. Anthony Wolf's book, "Mom, Jason's Breathing on me!".
Court is now adjourned in permanent recess!
Comments
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Ground them to each other
I have two children (adults now). A son and a daughter. They were born 6 years apart, my son came first. Once my daughter was old enough to bicker and fight with my son and vice versa, I didn't ground them (it was more of a punishment for me than them). What I would do is make them sit on the couch together, apologize to each other and make them hold hands for a pre-determined amount of time. It almost always worked as they would eventually start laughing cause the felt silly. I didn't do this every time cause I was afraid it would lose its effectiveness, but when I did use it, it worked.
Ground them to each other
I was talking to my big sis about how I was sick of my kids bickering, and had resorted to grounding them from each other. (Or as the author of the article says, they lost the right to be together) and she suggested that I try grounding them TO each other when they're fighting. It works for us. Sure, they'll argue harder for a few minutes ("look what you did!" "no, you did it!") but then they'll start laughing at the absurd situation and/or they'll team up and co-miserate about the lunatic mother they share. Before you know it, they're playing together like the happy siblings I always dreamed of.
Granted, I only have two -- this probably wouldn't work with 3 or more, because instead of all ganging up on mom, they'd surely gang up on each other.
Thanks for sharing your idea. Over the years, I get some of my best parenting ideas not from textbooks or journals but from other parents. Sounds like this has worked well for you!
Sibling Fighting
As the oldest of five children, raised in a home where screaming, fighting and kicking the crap out of each other was tolerated, I could not tolerate it as an adult.
So, I had an only child. Then fate brought me to a relationship with a man with two children. Three kids are bad news as lines are always drawn 2 vs. 1. And three spoiled 8-10 year olds is much worse.
After 3 or 4 months of tears, fights, yelling, and the like, it finally occured to me; the one standing in front of me crying and tattling, probably started it.
From that moment on, I decided that if there was ANY trouble, they all were in trouble. "Not fair" was the most often repeated line in the house.
It culminated with a fight between the brother and sister, where I went and got the third from his friends house to come home and participate in "ALL in trouble".
From that day on the kids self-regulated and self-controlled. The most common phrase became, "Come on! Please don't get us all in trouble!"
As my dad used to tell me, "You are who you hang out with. If you hang out with criminals, you become a criminal."
My kids learned that lesson the easy way AND the fighting all but stopped.
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