Sibling Rivalry

When our kids fight with one another it can be so draining and super challenging to know what to do in those moments. This episode talks through ideas for how to intervene and help our kids develop skills.

Our kids' first exposure to developing social skills is their relationship with their siblings. This gives them the opportunity to practice their skills in conflict resolution,  apologizing, empathy, etc. This means that the fighting our kids engage in with one another is completely normal and can even be healthy, as they being to practice and learn these new skills.

When our kids fight, it's our opportunity to teach skills, so we shouldn't intervene every time. You might say something like, "You guys need to figure it out." This is really challenging and triggers many of us as parents pretty quickly.

Punishment often doesn't work to address the issue with fighting, because it doesn't teach our kids new skills to avoid fighting with their sibling. Many times fighting is an attempt to get attention from a caregiver, communicating they need help, attunement, attention, etc. 

Be careful to not always intervene for the younger/smaller child, to avoid identifying the older one as the bad, mean, problematic one. It can also put the younger child into a victim role, causing them to cause mistreatment to get caretaking and attention from parents.

It's important to avoid seeing our kids as manipulative, which usually only means they're doing what they need to do to get their needs met. We have often trained them to know how to get what they want, which can feel like we are being manipulated, but it's simply them getting their needs met. We always want to chase the function behind the behavior instead of focusing on the behavior itself.

If fighting is  increasing your home, you can try cooperative games, like this, this, or this. You might also think about spending extra time with each other, putting activities in the car to keep them occupied, listening to recorded stories, etc.

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