Question
Answer
“What
causes sibling rivalry?” “Having more than one child.”
This joke always gets a laugh in my parenting presentations
but there is more than a hint of truth about it.
Sibling rivalry comes with the parenting territory. If you
feel uncomfortable with rivalry between siblings then maybe
it is best to stop at one child. After the birth of the
second child you may think you are bringing a playmate home
for the first born but in his or her eyes you have brought
someone into your home who is a rival for your affection and
attention. It seems that rivalry is most intense between
children adjacent to each other in the family tree.
The current trend to have small, planned families in many
ways promotes competition between siblings. Thirty-seven per
cent of Australian families have only two children, while
over a quarter of families contain three kids.
Rivalry can be intense when there are only two children in a
family as it is hard to escape a single sibling.
And as most parents know having an odd number of children
can present challenges as it seems one child is either
continually left out or two tend to combine forces against
one.
Some children are more prone to rivalry due to their
competitive temperaments. Could you imagine being a parent
of the Waugh twins as children! Life would have been one
long Test Match as there would have been a competitive
element to everything they did.
A certain amount of sibling rivalry is healthy for children.
Trying to do better than a sibling is one way children
extend themselves. The inevitable squabbles that accompany
sibling rivalry teach children to stand up for themselves in
the rough and tumble world of the schoolyard. But
family-life can become intolerable for parents when sibling
rivalry dominates every interaction between children or
spills over into continual bickering, fighting and teasing.
While in many ways sibling rivalry is natural some parenting
practices actually promote competition between kids.
Some classic rivalry raisers include:
-
Praise one child and criticize another. This rivalry raiser
never fails to drive a wedge between siblings.
-
Compare one child to another. A comment such as “why don’t you
keep your room tidy like your sister?” will ensure that there
always be one untidy bedroom in a house.
-
Solve
each and every dispute that children have between each other. It
is almost impossible to enter children’s disputes without taking
sides and then you will be accused of favoritism.
There are many
strategies you can use to decrease rivalry between children.
Here are three classic rivalry reducers:
-
Recognize their role in the family. Children will adopt
different roles in the family – one may be the peacemaker,
another the funny person and another the helper. While trying to
encourage each child to make a positive contribution accept
their own ways of being family members.
-
Focus
on the deed not the dude. Don’t praise them but focus your
comments on the process rather than the results, the act not the
actor, the performer rather than the performance.
-
Put
them in the same boat when they misbehave. Be willing for all
children to experience the consequences of a child’s
misbehavior. For instance, if one child is noisy in the car
then they all miss an activity if you return home.
Don't be too
perturbed if your children argue and fight with each other
at the drop of a hat. Some of the closest adult families
admit to habitually fighting when they were children. And
some young siblings I know are affectionate to each other
one minute and ready to fight tooth and nail the next. Let's
face it, children are hard to fathom at the best of times
and down-right impossible when they fight.
