The only way to maintain your own sanity here (which is to say, your only chance at preserving a little happiness under the assault) is to know, at root, what your family policy is in this or any of the other similar disputes—the one about the toy in the toddler’s hands, the one about the shirt from a sister’s closet, and worst of all, the one about the only findable hat of the four identical hats from the Capitals game that a well-meaning relative bought for each of your children. Whose is it? You have no idea. Neither do they, really. Except that they do. It’s “MINE!”
Before you can resolve property disputes like this, you need to answer one basic question: do your kids have to share?
Unless you’re already familiar with Heather Shumaker’s book It’s OK Not to Share, that might sound like a crazy question. But Heather’s mother teaches at a preschool in Columbus, Ohio (where Heather herself went as a child), where she applies what she calls “renegade” ideas. One of those ideas is that the children don’t have to share. If they’re playing with a toy, they, and they alone, decide when it’s time to give another child a chance.
“Young children aren’t ready to share,” Shumaker writes. “They’re ready to take turns.” Teaching children under five that their turn ends whenever another child wants a toy is the wrong lesson. Instead, parents should protect a child’s right to have her full experience with a toy and trust another child’s ability to wait. It’s okay to say, “I’m not done yet.”
You may decide the no-sharing-required philosophy won’t work in your house, or you may need to adjust it for circumstances. When my younger daughter arrived at preschool, there was a “you don’t have to give up your turn” policy with regard to the monkey bars on the playground. Every child was allowed to hang from them, one child at a time, until the playing child was done—the theory being, in part, that the child would exhaust her arm strength before too long had passed.
Back and forth my kid would go, back and forth, dangling from one arm, then going back and forth again—for the entire outdoor play period. Others would wait patiently and never get a turn at all. There seemed to be no limit to her strength or her interest, especially if she knew others were waiting. They had to change the rule to “once across and done.”
That worked, too. You may feel that you have a child who, given a no-sharing policy, would remain at a particularly desirable toy for hours, racing back there after meals, falling asleep there in the evening, and waking only to shriek “I’m not done!” (I might know that child.) So for your family, some toys might come with time or use limits, or turns with all toys might last only until bedtime. What’s important is to find a successful approach that you can feel happy and confident implementing.
The concept of “long turns” and having a right not to share is mostly for children under five. We expect our elementary-school-aged children to behave more equitably, especially with respect to household shared property. Allowing a thirteen-year-old a twelve-hour “long turn” on the only household computer without engaging him in a conversation about the needs and feelings of other family members is clearly not going to work.
But when it comes to the thirteen-year-old’s own device, particularly one purchased from his savings, while you might limit his time on it, you probably wouldn’t require that he share it with his younger sister. You can extend that idea to other personal property, no matter how reasonable the proposed sharing sounds. To take an example from Siblings Without Rivalry, an older sister may not be ready to share a shirt from her closet, even if it’s outgrown. We all get attached to certain objects or even just to the idea of what’s “ours.” That’s normal. One possible family rule there is that she doesn’t have to share her things until she’s ready.
So, what about the mystery item in the garage, the one left untouched for months (or even years) until unearthed by a sibling? If the ownership is unquestioned, the policy least likely to blow back in your face is to support that ownership, which is black-and-white and can be understood by even the youngest child. “He’s right. It’s his if he still wants it. Son, if you decide that maybe you’ve outgrown that Thomas the Tank Engine, your sister would like to play with it. But if not, it’s still yours.”
As for the Capitals hat of unknown origin? If you have a large family of children, you won’t be surprised to hear that this is a problem we confront regularly. For most identical items, we label immediately upon acquisition. But sometimes something gets by me, and there we are, at 6:55 a.m., trying to leave the house when the disputed hat appears on someone’s head. Experience tells me that if left to resolve this without help, three of my four children will come to blows, and even the fourth might be pushed to the limit.
What do I do? Often, I can make an educated guess about whether the hat wearer took the hat from his own cubby, or picked it up wherever he found it. I know which children are most likely to have left a hat in which part of the house, car, or larger universe. I investigate a little, see if I can find other hats and narrow it down. Then I just put it out there: “Look, you know where you got the hat. If it’s not yours, give it back. If you can’t agree on whose hat it is or who can use it today, give it to me and wear another hat.”
We live in New England. There’s always another hat.
PERSONAL SPACE
When it comes to the battle over personal space, there are really two things at play. First, there’s the question of whether a child wants to interact with a sibling or be with her at all. Second, there’s the space itself—the territory. Children can fight over either or, more often, both.
While a complete non-intervention policy over most disputes often results in a tacit favoring of the older, more powerful child, leaving children to work out space disputes is likely to favor the younger of the battling pair. We hit this when one of our daughters was twelve and beginning to want the space to grow into her teenaged self, and the other was a young-for-her-age eleven, struggling a little bit to find her own footing. They fought constantly: over their bedroom, their friends, their behavior in front of the other’s friends, how tall their older brother was and whether the younger child’s fifth birthday had occurred on a Wednesday. If one said, “It’s cold out,” the other said, “It is not.”
At the same time, it was clear that my younger daughter admired her older sister. She wanted to be with her, even while she resented being excluded. Anywhere our big girl went, her little sister followed, out of affection, desperation, and a sheer need to poke the beast. Finally, the twelve-year-old took to getting up at 5:30, before the rest of the family got up at 6:20, in order to have some time for herself.
One morning we were awakened by furious shouting, slamming doors, and the noise of feet pounding through the upstairs and down the hall to our room. “She got up! She got up on purpose and I was holding the bathroom door open and she ran under my arm and got in the shower and she turned it on and it’s not fair!”
It took a long time to calm the house down from all the rude awakenings, but later, I found my younger daughter’s alarm clock. Sure enough, she had set it to 5:29.
This isn’t an uncommon dynamic between an older and younger sibling. If one wants to be alone and the other wants to be together, the one who wants to be alone might not be able to find any space without your help. Little brothers and sisters can be incredibly persistent. It’s not really alone time if you’re spending it in your closet with a five-year-old standing outside banging on the door (and while some kids will eventually go away, some really won’t).
“I was the little sister knocking on the door of my brother’s room,” said Shumaker. “I was the kid who wanted company, he was a loner type who loved his private space. But when he granted me access, and we played together, I was on top of the world.” How can we help our children begin to respect another’s need for alone time on the one side, and open themselves up again to their siblings on the other?
“I think parents need to make so
me decisions around what territory children can be possessive of,” said Shumaker. “If a child has a bedroom, they should be able to say if they want another child in it. Or maybe they should be the boss of their bed or a little closet.” Other parents suggest designated “alone time,” like right after school. “Children may not like being temporarily banished,” said Shumaker, “but just like they can handle waiting for a toy, they can handle this.” To make it easier, she suggests asking an older child when she feels like she might be ready to play with a younger sibling. In our family, playing with a little brother or sister can sometimes be a way to get some extra video game time, and we intentionally choose games that require cooperation as well as competition.
After the morning incident, we realized that our girls needed us to guide them in working this out. We found calmer moments to get them to agree on some ground rules that would give the older girl some space while not giving her the right to toss her sister from their shared room on a whim. We endured many complaints from the younger daughter when she was excluded, and even more from the older girl when she couldn’t be indulged. Sometimes, especially when our older daughter had friends over, we took that chance to spend time with our younger girl alone. Eventually, as our younger daughter started to accept the need to give her sister some space, our older girl came around, and they were able to start doing things together again.
When Things Get Physical
Before you had children, you probably could have told me exactly how you’d handle an incident of hitting, biting, or kicking between siblings. Intolerable, you might have said. Hands are not for hitting! People are not for hurting! You, of course, as a parent, would draw a nice clear black line.
Now that you are that parent, you know things are more complicated than that. You know that one child can provoke another into a physical response, that you can’t believe anyone when it comes to a disagreement over what constitutes an “accident,” and that sometimes they really are having fun pinching and poking—but sometimes they aren’t, or sometimes they’re having fun until suddenly one isn’t. You know, in short, that blame can be hard to assign and that the line is much fuzzier than you ever imagined, but that it’s still important to draw it. It’s just much more difficult than you thought it would be.
Most sibling conflict, even when it gets a little physical, is minor within the grand scheme of things, even though it may not feel like it at the time. Rivalry is normal and even healthy for kids. Sibling aggression, though, is different. At its worst, it’s a form of family violence, and one that should be taken seriously (and that requires professional help). For most families, though, it’s more a question of keeping things from ever getting out of hand without losing your mind in the process (as you surely will if you get involved every time someone kicks someone else in the backseat).
How do you know when to intervene? You don’t, most of the time. Not for certain. There’s the rare case when the bite marks on the screaming baby’s arm can be easily traced back to the beaming toddler seated next to him, but most of the time, it’s all shades of gray. You will come down like a bolt of lightning on the child accused of pushing another child’s broken arm, only to hear later that even the offended child thought it was an accident. You will accept the “it was an accident” explanation for the child who Rollerblades over the other child’s toes only to hear a tearful confession later.
You may not know what’s really going on until they tell you, and by then they’ll probably be grown with kids of their own. Meanwhile, here are a few strategies to make things easier.
Make it a big deal. Don’t look the other way, not for any of it. Even if they both say they’re joking around. Even if you know there was provocation. Get in there between them. Restate your family rules: there’s no hitting, no pinching, no holding someone’s legs so they can’t roll off the back of the couch like they meant to, and no kicking the person holding your legs. (It’s okay if these aren’t exactly rules you’ve been over before.)
Or don’t. On the other hand, depending on your family composition and your personal history, you may choose to look the other way for nearly all of it. My three youngest children do sometimes get physical, but they are all generally the same size and shape, and equally likely to attack or defend. Their alliances shift. No one is ganged up on; there is no constant victim or aggressor. I wish it were not so, but I get that there are just times when children who live together—at least, my children—roughhouse. Feelings get conveyed in pokes, whacks, and kicks that can’t be expressed any other way. The older they get, the more they’re able to work it out on their own, even with the occasional hip-check. I’ve largely stopped getting in their way.
Treat both attacker and victim equally. When all you know is that he said, and then she said, and then somebody did something and then somebody did something else and then there were tears, try this: treat them both equally. If there’s an injury that merits snuggling and sympathy, gather everyone up. “Oh, that must really hurt where she hit you. Oh, you must have been so mad to do that. This is terrible! 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 with no consideration of blame. “That’s it, playtime is over. You—empty the dishwasher. You—go upstairs and bring down all the laundry.”
There are no innocents. There are exceptions to this—sometimes you’re holding a hockey stick and you turn around and it catches someone right in the head—but for the most part, kids who are hurting each other or getting hurt were already doing something you’ve told them not to do. You cannot, for example, get hit by flailing arms if you aren’t giving an unwanted “hug.” If you’re not lying across the back of the couch where someone is reading, putting your feet on that someone’s neck, you’re not going to get pushed off the couch.
Why won’t they just keep their distance from one another during day-to-day life? Why do they get so rough? I do not know. Sometimes, your kids know the risks, and they do dumb things to one another anyway, and then someone gets hurt. It’s hard to cope with, and it seems as if it ought to be easy to know what to do, but it’s not. If everyone involved feels terrible afterward, you can at least feel secure that you’re on the right track.
Pure Deviltry
Sometimes there is no conflict. Sometimes, there are just children, using their powers for evil with time-honored techniques such as repeating everything a sibling says, scooching over on the couch until a sibling is squashed up against the arm, touching the cookie a brother is eating, or walking up behind a sister and putting cold fingers against the back of her neck.
This morning two of my children argued for ten minutes over whether their school was closed for Rosh Hashanah in 2015. Other classics include “who’s taller,” “who’s faster,” and “my hockey team could beat your hockey team.” Mostly, this is just background noise. If I get involved—some of these are factual questions, after all: “I could just measure you” or “Look that up”—they’ll move on to one of the other countless recurring disputes, like “Who found the big chocolate bunny that Easter two years ago when everything was outside?” or “Whose green tie-dyed Frisbee from the craft thing we all did on summer vacation is stuck on the roof of the shed?” So I try to ignore rather than intervene.
But a bickering backdrop can be hard to put up with, or worse, it can start you off on a mental hamster wheel: Should I stop them? When should I stop them? How should I stop them? In his book “Mom, Jason’s Breathing on Me!,” Anthony E. Wolf has an answer. His advice? Stop them as soon as you’re annoyed, and without taking sides or addressing whatever they’re squabbling about. You do you, which might mean you tune them out, and might mean you bring the hammer down every time. At our house, that sounds like “Both of you, stop that right now,” and “I’m going to pull the car over until the two of you work this out.” Every so often, I see another car pulled over to the side of the road for appare
ntly no reason, and I look in the window, and I see a couple of kids waving their arms and a parent with his or her head down on the steering wheel. I always give a little wave. Solidarity.
What to Say
Whether it’s real fighting or just general bickering, I find it helps me to have actual, go-to phrases I can employ rather than shrieking the first thing off the top of my head, which is rarely constructive. Most of them I didn’t make up—I collected them over years of reading and writing about parenting, and years of trying to improve the sibling situation at our house. I’ve nailed down the origin of some of my favorites, several of which I use so often that they provoke eye-rolling from my kids, who know that what I really mean is “I get that you’re upset, but I am so not going to be helpful.” Some are from Siblings Without Rivalry:
I have confidence that you two can work it out.
It’s your whatever, and it’s your choice whether to share it. If you can, that would be great, but if you can’t, that’s okay, too.
And from “Mom, Jason’s Breathing on Me!”:
That sounds really frustrating.
Gosh, that must be really annoying.
(Sometimes I suspect both of these are themselves somewhat frustrating and annoying, but sometimes they invite a child to keep talking until she comes to her own solution or has emptied out her feelings. It’s important to remember that you don’t have to go in there. She is frustrated, she is annoyed. You don’t have to be.)
When my kids were younger, the language was more about teaching than leaving them to sort it out. A few go-tos from Peaceful Parent, Happy Siblings:
Looks like we have a problem. We can solve this.
How to Be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life, and Loving (Almost) Every Minute Page 9