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Parenting Articles about Sibling Rivalry
You love your children, but they don't always seem to love each other. Are you tired of the constant fighting and arguing that come with sibling rivalry? Empowering Parents tells you how to handle sibling rivalry effectively and restore peace in your home.
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Why are our kids often at each other’s throats in the summer? The biggest cause of fighting during the long summer break is the fact that you’re spending a whole lot of time together. If external stresses increase, so does the tension inside your house. We all start to feel boxed in when this happens, and it’s easy to lose your temper at moments like these. Your kids begin to act out, too—the typical pattern of name–calling, teasing, criticizing and bossing each other around increases until the atmosphere is thick with everyone’s annoyance and bad feelings. |
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Sibling rivalry is normal in families with more than one child. It becomes a problem when one child bullies or dominates the other. It’s also a more complex issue than it first appears. On the surface, you have two kids who are “at war”—who bicker constantly and don’t get along. There can be many reasons for this, but at the core of this rivalry is a common theme that runs through it all: the sense that one sibling is the victim of the other and somehow “less than.” And that child often believes that he gets less love from his parents than his acting out brother or sister does. |
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Are you tired of being the referee for all your kids’ fights? Do they constantly argue, leaving you exhausted and frustrated as a parent, wondering where you went wrong with them? Carole Banks, MSW, LCSW is the manager of the Parental Support Line for the Total Transformation Program, and in this article she gives helpful advice that will empower you to you stop the sibling rivalry show and start enjoying being a parent again. The most important thing to remember: never place your children in the roles of good kid and bad kid. |
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Children who grow up with a chronically defiant, oppositional sibling grow up in an environment of trauma. According to James Lehman, It’s traumatizing when something hurtful happens to you, and you can’t control it, you can’t stop it, you can’t predict how hurtful it’s going to be, and you can’t predict when or whether it’s going to happen. Here, he discusses how parents can reduce the traumatic effects of hostile behavior on siblings and how to help “the lost child” in the family. |
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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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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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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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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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“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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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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It is late January and my home is knee deep in the post-holiday let down, pre-birthday craze, cabin fever zoo/mess! Now that I’ve finally packed up all the holiday “stuff” and the new toys have been well broken in, it seems we are back to hearing the mantra, “I’m bored! There’s nothing to do…” and the incessant whining or fighting between the kids. Today, all I can think about is how spoiled my children can be! They don’t even know how lucky they truly are; it saddens and frustrates me. Granted we don’t have an extravagant lifestyle by any means, as we are somehow living on one income, but I do my best to provide games, toys and resources for the kids that, in my mind, enable them to never have “nothing” to do. Of course every mother wishes her children would be grateful and enjoy what is offered, but too often they act as if it is just never enough. Sometimes I just want to yell, “Enough!” myself!
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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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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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I ended my last blog post for EP by saying that our daughter was given the diagnosis of ADHD and began Ritalin in first grade, which seemed to be a miracle...
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