Reducing the Risk of Sibling Rivalry

Reducing the Risk of Sibling Rivalry

While my ten-year-old son tackles and pins the six-year-old neighbor girl in the living room, I sit at the kitchen table and type away on my laptop. In this case, "it" is a wrestling match. My seven-year-old daughter and the eleven-year-old boy next door will face off when the kitchen timer goes off. They do work together on occasion.

Although I may appear careless to an outsider, I am actually quite aware of my surroundings at all times. My attitude of nonchalance toward conflict resolution is the result of many hours of watching fights like these from a distance. This is a bunch of kids who have always looked out for one another. They have won the right to host wrestling competitions. No one has ever been wounded, despite all the banging and crashing that goes on.

The larger ones manage to keep their bodies under check so as not to harm the smaller ones. It's incredible to see it in person. How they manage to achieve it is beyond me. They're as cute as a puppy. They are sensitive to the boundaries between themselves and others, and they do not wish to cross the line that separates harmless play from abusive treatment. They feel the need and want to engage in rough-and-tumble play with one another.

Many adults worry about their children engaging in roughhousing. We want to jump in and shield the helpless. We have guidelines in place to ensure everyone's safety, such as not hitting, not shoving, and even not calling people names (which is a topic for another article). However, children don't need to follow these guidelines. They're to make us feel like attentive, caring parents. Children typically do not want to cause harm to one another. Even when they're not simply wrestling but actually fighting. They just want to protect themselves, their property, and their personal space.

If one child grabs a toy that another child is using, the other child will likely reclaim the toy, push the other child away, and continue playing. Rarely would the user set down the toy to go after or punish the perpetrator. When confronted with such adversity, offenders usually only do it once or twice more before giving up.

The only way things may spiral out of control is if we, the adults, intervene in this natural feedback cycle. This is due to the fact that the offended party is frequently tasked with reclaiming the object through the medium of verbal exchange. What do you think, folks? Young children are notoriously resistant to this strategy. 

They're bodily rather than merely verbal. Yes, we may believe that we are fostering civilized behavior in them. If a child's natural and suitable protection against a violation is removed and replaced with one that is typically ineffective, the youngster has no means of self-defense. This turns him into an appealing victim, and as he is repeatedly violated and unable to successfully protect himself, he grows enraged. And while we're not looking, he gives the other kid a good whacking.

When my daughter was around a year old, I first saw this dynamic. She would simply take a toy from her younger brother, who was only three at the time, and run off. I had drilled into him the importance of never striking his sibling. She completely disregarded his polite request for the return of the toy. He couldn't get his toy back unless he came and got me to interfere.

My rule had deprived him of agency and made him an easy target. As a result, I was thrust into the role of enforcer and was included in virtually all of their exchanges. If I couldn't help him, he'd be in trouble. I failed miserably at playing toy cop when my efforts were continually disrupted.

It didn't take me long to realize that this plan was doomed to fail. I couldn't stand how often I had to stop what I was doing. My little girl had already taken many steps toward being a bully. And at around the same moment, something odd occurred in our corridor. Suddenly, it appeared as though they couldn't pass each other going in different directions without him knocking her over with his elbow. (which makes us ponder the origins of sibling rivalry).

So I showed him how to take his stuff back from her, using words and force if necessary. When she started striking him, he could hold her arms down by her sides. As a result, equilibrium was re-established. She discovered the hard way that punching and grasping would not be tolerated. He trained himself to protect his territory without resorting to physical violence. It was relieving to see that they could solve their problems without me hovering over them. Also, the size of our hallway is back to normal, which is a nice plus.

Important to this tactic is the restriction on the enforcer of the boundaries to using only as much force as is required to halt the attack. I'd have to step in if my son took the toy back, chased her around the house with it, and bashed her over the head with it.

Conditions were quite amenable to forgiveness when I prompted this intuitive balancing. There was never enough time for anger to turn into resentment. After a rule was broken, they quickly fixed it so they could get back to doing what they really wanted to do play.

What do you think a kid brought up this way would think of the world right now? Perhaps it is necessary to forbid people from assaulting others, crossing invisible lines, and endangering the lives of those around them. Therefore, we will defend ourselves and others with no more force than is absolutely required. We will then resume our duties as responsible global citizens as soon as feasible.