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Jun
29
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 My children are six-and-a-half years apart, so I have always considered myself lucky that they never seemed to have sibling rivalry issues. Imagine my surprise when I met my now-husband, and a competition developed between his 2-year-old (at the time) and my then- 5-year-old son! His other son was 6 and we expected the competition to be between the two of them, not the 2 year old! What we saw was that my son and the 6 year old did not have a lot in common as far as playing. They got along well enough, but they did not like the same toys. In fact, the 6 year old was more into reading, hanging with the grown-ups and computer “stuff” than playing with action figures, Legoes, cars or Imaginext. BUT the 2 year old was!! He coveted my son’s toys. He wanted to play with it all and my son wanted no part of that. And so it began…
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Archive for the ‘Sibling Rivalry’ Category
Blog Posts by Emmie
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May
13
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Lately, it’s been all about competition in our house. E likes to play board games but he expects to win each time. If he does win, he makes fun of the person who lost. (“Ha ha, I win, you lose!”) If he doesn’t win, he cries about it. I’ve taken it upon myself to teach him about healthy competition and how it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, as long as you’re nice about it.
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Dec
15
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Growing up, siblings close in age are usually the best of friends and playmates — most of the time. Eventually, however, they will revert to primitive instinctual behavior when vying for a coveted toy, favorite television program, snack or their parents’ attention. In our home overrun by five kids — the eldest is 9 and youngest is 2 — competition is stiff and each child must cultivate and hone a specific talent that draws attention to themselves and away from their siblings. Darwin’s renowned Survival of the Fittest theory states that in the natural and oftentimes hostile world, where many predators are competing for a limited supply of prey, only the genes of the strongest and fittest of each species will survive and continue mutating and adapting to its respective environmental conditions.
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Dec
09
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Do your kids’ social lives differ from each other drastically? When my son E was younger, it seemed easy to find play dates for him. I belonged to a play group in my neighborhood and a bunch of my friends had kids around the same age. Even when we moved from the Midwest to the east coast, I was still able to help him find friends (it was easier for him than for myself). Nothing delighted me more than the sound of kids running through the house screaming. It meant that he had friends and was having fun and I excused the loudness. When we moved to a different state last year (also out east), E once again made friends automatically. He connected with our neighbors’ kids, as well as kids from shul and kids from his school.
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Oct
22
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“I win!” my seven year-old son shouted triumphantly as he shoved past his ten year-old brother and raced inside the door. “No, you didn’t,” the elder retorted smugly. “I won. I had my hand on the door first.” My younger son immediately howled, burst into tears, and then promptly delivered a smart thump on the back of his older brother.
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Mar
18
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When you have a child with behavioral issues attached to a mood disorder, the entire family is impacted. Sometimes it’s like experiencing the aftershocks from an earth quake where you live with the trepidation that at any moment the slightest shaking could become cataclysmic. Other days you are aware that every moment is a bombardment of agitated aggression, irritation, and frustration let loose in the form of verbal assaults, whining, and general chaos created in your living space. It is an exhaustive time for all, where your adrenaline is constantly flowing and nerves are left twitching. The child initiating the mayhem can spend hours in and out of time-out, or wrestling with consequences, but in the end he/she has succeeded in monopolizing everyone’s time and attention. This is our life. | |||
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Mar
10
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This may sound strange, but during a recent visit of about ten local kids to our house I was more than a little relieved to come around the corner and catch a big brother roughing up a little brother. Unaware that we were in the vicinity, the elder had just delivered an elbow thrust to the chest of the foot-shorter sibling and then followed up with a solid slam of his brother’s torso into the wall for good measure. I thought to myself, “Whew! So it happens in other families, too.”
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Feb
04
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My 6 year-old son has developed a rather creative form of aggression. Unable to come up with anything more accurate or artistic, the name that my other (9 year-old) son, my fiancé, and I settled on is the word “chinny”.
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