Some advice in dealing with sibling fighting, from an op-ed in the NY Times
Bad and even dangerous advice, I might add, although neither uniformly bad nor uniformly dangerous. The author’s general suggestion is to let them be to work it out themselves, and/or to treat (or punish) them equally, which is actually quite common advice [emphasis mine]:
Siblings offer early, on-the-job training in how to work and live with other people. They also provide a crash course in how to manage intense emotions: envy, hatred, anger. In children of all ages, but especially younger children, the urge to compete for parental attention is innate. Among teenagers, sibling conflict helps them work out their need to differentiate from family and to set their own boundaries. Overall, research suggests the benefits of sibling disagreements include increased skills in understanding others, negotiating, persuading and problem solving…
When it comes to sibling conflicts, there are rarely innocents. For the most part, kids who are hurting one another or getting hurt, physically or emotionally, were already doing something you’ve told them not to do, and you won’t know the truth until they’re giving the toasts at one another’s weddings.
When all you know is that he said and then she said and then somebody did something and then there were tears, try this: Treat them equally. If there’s an injury that merits sympathy, gather everyone up. “Oh, that must really hurt where she hit you. Oh, you must have been so mad to do that. What can we do to make things better?”
Alternatively, if you’re just frustrated with the lot of them, take it out on everyone equally. “That’s it, playtime is over. You — empty the dishwasher. You — bring down the laundry.” If everyone involved feels terrible, you can feel secure that you’re on the right track.
All those things are good advice if—and only if—the fighting is the ordinary sort of sibling conflict in which relatively equally matched and pretty well-adjusted kids are squabbling. But are there really “rarely innocents”? There is another form of sibling fighting that is basically sibling abuse, and we don’t know its actual extent although it’s certainly not the majority of cases (we tend to think of sibling abuse as sexual abuse, which also exists, but I’m not referring to that).
It is often difficult for a parent to tell the difference between mere fighting of the ordinary type and abuse. Advice like that of the Times columnist, who is a parent of four—the sort of advice you’ll often see coming from “experts” as well—is dangerous if that advice doesn’t also include guidelines that help a parent tell when the squabbling is actually abuse in which a more powerful (either emotionally or physically or both) sibling habitually torments another sibling who is, in fact, innocent of any wrongdoing. The fact of the latter sibling’s being alive as a natural rival and irritant is usually enough to spark the abuse from the other sibling in these cases, rather than any behavior (much less any guilty behavior) on the part of the victim sibling.
That situation must not be allowed to continue; it is dangerous for both siblings, but particularly for the victim, and has the potential to leave deep and lifelong scars. “Letting them fight it out” and “treating them equally” is exactly the wrong thing to do in that situation; it tells the victimized child that there is no hope of rescue, and encourages him or her to blame him/herself for the cruel acts of others.
This topic was a particular interest of mine back when I was in graduate school, which was over twenty years ago. I did a lot of reading, wrote a long paper on the subject, and found that there was little to no discussion of the distinction at that time except for the paper I wrote. I’m pleased to see that a quick Googling just now has revealed a host of articles about the subject, so it seems that the state of knowledge and awareness has improved at least somewhat. But back then, I also designed a research project with a questionnaire aimed at uncovering and studying the difference. I never performed the research, although I probably would have, had I been going for a PhD.
In my quick look at the offerings now available online on the subject, I didn’t see anything resembling the research I had proposed. Most of the articles are fairly general. This seems to be one of the more informational ones. For example:
We need more research to find out exactly how and why sibling abuse happens. Experts think there are a number of possible risk factors:
–Parents are not around much at home
–Parents are not very involved in their children’s lives, or are emotionally distant
–Parents accept sibling rivalry and fights as part of family life, rather than working to minimize them
–Parents have not taught kids how to handle conflicts in a healthy way from early on
–Parents do not stop children when they are violent (they may assume it was an accident, part of a two-way fight, or normal horseplay)
In my own paper, I emphasized those first three points as key. The literature at the time stated as a given that children fight in order to gain parents’ attention and favoritism, and that is of course often true. But sibling abuse tends to have the characteristic of occurring most often outside the awareness of parents, so it certainly does not have the function of gaining parents’ attention. Its distinguishing characteristic is that its goal is to hurt (not necessarily physically, although sometimes physically) the victimized child, and the abusing child does not want to be caught and does not want the parents’ attention called to his/her actions. So naturally, the more the parents are away and the children are unsupervised or inadequately supervised, the more opportunity the abusive child has to harm the other child. And the more the two are blamed equally by parents for whatever fighting they do see, the worse it is for the victimized child, and the more blame he/she takes on in addition to the abuse.
The catch, of course, is that if much of the abuse takes place outside of the parents’ awareness, how would the parent ever know it’s happening? The articles I looked at recommend noticing behavioral signs such as nightmares, but those are relatively nonspecific. All I can suggest is to maintain awareness of the potential problem and to keep the lines of communication open, and also to be especially alert for it if there are marked differentials in size and age and personality between or among siblings. I would add “go for help to a family therapist,” but unfortunately many such therapists are not aware of the distinction and will give advice similar to that of the Times article, so be alert for that, too.
The illustration that accompanies the Times article is also typical of such “leave them alone” articles, because it shows equally matched siblings, which is so often not the case:
So, how common is such abuse? I’m not talking about single acts of sibling physical violence that are severe enough that they get reported to authorities as such (the only discussions I could find when I wrote my paper was of that sort of thing—for example, sibling murder). That link I gave earlier puts it this way:
Experts estimate that three children in 100 are dangerously violent toward a brother or sister. A 2005 study puts the number of assaults each year to children by a sibling at about 35 per 100 kids. The same study found the rate to be similar across income levels and racial and ethnic groups.
But “number of assaults” probably doesn’t measure what I’m interested in, either. It probably just is an estimate of hits, which is not the same thing as the incidence of physical and/or emotional abuse. I looked at one of the studies cited which is available online (see this), and it lumps in sibling assaults with assaults by children in general, so it’s not useful for determining the incidence of the phenomenon I’m talking about. I think it’s telling that, even among many researchers, the matter has been relatively neglected and/or minimized.
Interestingly enough, when I looked at the comments to the Times piece, nearly every single one I read was an objection to the article from a person who claimed to have been subject to sibling abuse that was unchecked and had serious negative repercussions for them. That certainly indicates a fairly high level of incidence, at least in the anecdotal sense.
My older sister- by two years- was mean to me- both physically and emotionally- until one day when I was in 7th grade and she was in 9th. After she locked me out of the house, we had a fight- not unusual for us. What was unusual was that I came close to holding my own in the fight. After that, my sister was nice to me, and we got along fine. I have heard similar stories with younger brothers and older sisters in the two to three age range difference.
My sister beating up on me was not abuse, as she didn’t have the physical strength to merit calling her blows abuse.
What if your sisters turn out to be liberals later in life?
Ever since Dr Spock people have been thinking that good parenting was something to be worked out anew. Which, if one is inclined to assume that thousands of prior generation’s experiences have nothing to contribute to the matter… makes perfect sense.
But it’s really not complicated; love + reason + guided discipline = good parenting = the optimum environment that parental circumstance can provide.
I think everything Neo said is excellent, especially the part about determining if the fighting constitutes “abuse” rather than just “fussing” and will cogitate on it for awhile in relation to my own parenting experience, but I wanted to comment first on a couple of other excerpts from the NYT article.
“Rules like no hitting one another, no stealing, no excluding. Then the hit comes after blatant instigation, the theft is retaliation for an offense so bad you never even thought to forbid it, and the sibling who wants to play with her big sister’s friends is the same one who blabbed the secrets shared at the last sleepover all over the playground.”
These are true in the macrocosm of adult life as well, especially political and judicial affairs – it’s the things you don’t see, don’t think about, and don’t deal with properly the first time, that come back to bite you.
“Many young parents might be inspired to look for shows or stories that teach warring siblings how to resolve disagreements. But when Dr. Kramer compared her More Fun With Sisters and Brothers program, which teaches children how to resolve conflicts with siblings, with a different program that exposed children to books and cartoons about managing sibling conflicts, she found that the children exposed to the media learned something else entirely.
As described in Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman’s book “NurtureShock,” “After six weeks, the sibling relationship quality had plummeted.” Why? Because the stories also taught “novel ways to be mean to younger siblings.” In a later study of 261 books that portrayed sibling relationships, Dr. Kramer found that the average book showed as much bad behavior as good behavior.”
Some time ago, I was reading a history of the early Catholic Church, and the topic was the confessional. I think the time period was something medieval. At any rate, the leaders, being concerned then (more than now) with sexual purity, decided that they didn’t want any of the members “sneaking by” despite their forbidden behavior, so they sent out a long list of very specific sins to ask about.
Some time later, being alarmed by reports that sexual deviancy was rising instead of declining, they did a debriefing of the clergy, and promptly discontinued the list: they discovered that the confessional session was just giving the boys new ideas.
“Either “good parents know that children need to be taught how to resolve conflict” (intervene) or “good parents know that conflict is about parental attention, and so they let children figure it out for themselves” (ignore). In theory, all you have to do is decide which kind of “good parent” you are.
In practice there’s a continuum. Parents intervene by teaching children strategies for working things out, and then ignore by stepping back to allow them to apply what they’ve learned.”
And kids are at different points ON that continuum.
In general, this is just a restatement of any skill-learning procedure: explain, demonstrate, practice, and let them get on with life.
My primary tactic, when the boys actually brought a conflict to me for resolution, was to ask: what do you want me to do about it?
Then I usually followed their quite reasonable solution and they went away satisfied.
AesopFan:
I very much doubt one of your boys was actually abusing the other, however.
Even WORSE: It rewards the victimizer and encourages the victimizer to continue.
While bickering for mom or dad’s attention occured, it was never physical. The kids knew that would result in serious consequences. My wife was a stay at home mom until the youngest entered first grade, she worked part time until the youngest entered high school. A parent at home 24/7 has no substitute. I realize that is not possible for all 2 parent families, but it is the ideal.
When I was 11 and my sister was 16 my parents went away for the weekend and for the first time left us on our own with her in charge. Well, she let the new found power go to her head (my opinion) and a huge argument broke out during which I threw a banana milk shake at her for which she responded by throwing her wooden clog shoe (it was 1980) at me which I turned away from but it hit in the back of the shoulder. I started crying because I was 11 and it really hurt and then the fight was on. The next day when my parents got home I was quick to point out the massive bruise on my back from being hit with a flying piece of wood and that was the last time she was ever left in charge.
Hadn’t thought about that in years until I saw this post. Thankfully my sister and I get along reasonably well now as adults but wow as kids there were some donnybrooks.
Wow, I feel like I grew up rather blandly – my siblings and I didn’t have any such fights, nor lasting scars.
However, I have met adults in life who harbor such grudges against a sibling that they go into childish mode when talking to their siblings or refuse to talk with them at all.
So, whatever our parents did right I cannot thank them enough!
I don’t know exactly what we did right but, knock on wood, our 28 year old daughter and 25 year old son get along very well. Both husband and I were only children, bookish, bullied at times. We absolutely refused to ignore bad treatment by our kids of each other, maybe because we remembered being bullied and also some resentment when “all the kids” were punished for being “bad” when it truly was never us doing the bad stuff. Intense conflicts between our kids were pretty much at our daughter’s instigation (she’s a steamroller) and we didn’t expect our sweet, naive son to be able to counter her worst domineering tendencies. If there was not blatant abuse/violence (immediate intervention), I’d ask them what they thought was a fair or practical way to resolve issues. One of our daughter’s many redeeming qualities is that she wouldn’t actually propose an unfair solution, as much as she may have hated to admit it.
neo-neocon Says:
July 9th, 2018 at 5:22 pm
AesopFan:
I very much doubt one of your boys was actually abusing the other, however.
* * *
I never thought so – they were pretty easy-going with each other except for whose turn it was on the video games, but after Number-Five got home from his mission, he advised me that his older brothers were always beating up on him.
There were never any complaints at the time (full-time parent on-site, so that was not the problem), and no obvious injuries, so I think he meant it figuratively, but I can see why the youngest would feel muchly put upon growing up.
However, they have all reconciled with each other at this date.
Sometimes when we had conflicting schedules, I would ask them to give me a read-out on how likely they were to need psychological counseling if the parental units didn’t make it to a concert or game or whatever: most of the time they only rated their event a 1 or 2; if they got to 4 or 5, we made sure to reschedule our things and attend.
My 2yr older sister would get beat up by my 2yr older step-sister Sue– and sometimes so would I. And sometimes we two would beat her up. Yet we were pretty reasonably social then, and later.
Alcoholic parents, including a wife-beater / child beater father who was a successful womanizer/ cheater, plus a smart, richer, provoking step-mum; we had far bigger problems than sibling problems. Which still don’t seem like abuse.
After more than 25 years, I saw Sue again and it was fine. We had been in Facebook contact the last few years, but living far away no visits.
My older son’s domination of second son and younger daughter is also far less than abuse, but there have been times when the younger sibling was certainly a victim.
“The fact of the latter sibling’s being alive as a natural rival and irritant is usually enough to spark the abuse from the other sibling in these cases”
Yes. Parents need to be aware this does happen, and is usually very well concealed. The things to watch for are big change in the victim’s mood when the siblings are seperated, and ireconcilably different stories about the same events. Parental naivity and optimism are the enabling weaknesses.