How to Be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life, and Loving (Almost) Every Minute

by Kj Dell'Antonia

  Can you tell your brother how you feel?

  Do you think your sister likes that?

  What did you hear your brother say?

  I reached out to my community of parents, and I asked them: what are your set-piece sayings when it comes to battling siblings? Quite a few people offered variations on “If no one’s bleeding, I don’t want to hear about it.” Here are the best of the rest:

  You can be mad, but you can’t be mean.

  —Jessica Michaelson, Austin, Texas

  God willing, you will know each other a lot longer than I will be around, so figure it out.

  —Andrea Hoag, Lawrence, Kansas

  Why are you telling me this? Sounds like you have a problem with him.

  —Karen Smith, Glen Ellyn, Illinois

  If you can’t agree on it, no one gets it.

  —Rob Jones, Westchester County, New York

  It doesn’t matter who started it.

  —Jeremy Shatan, New York, New York

  I was a sibling once. I know how it goes. I don’t need the whole story. I trust you can work it out without me.

  —Bernadette Noll, Austin, Texas

  Who are you people and what are you doing in my house?

  —Deb Amlen, New York, New York

  When It’s Time to Extract Yourself

  I’ve been drawing from my daughters’ rough patch throughout this chapter (the alarm clock story in the “Personal Space” section occurred about halfway through). I suspect it could have been a lot shorter if I’d started writing this chapter earlier in the process.

  I was used to brokering multi-sibling bickering and shifting rivalries. We had worked with our kids on negotiating conflict for many years, not as some sort of organized perfect-parent plan, but just over the process of growing up in a big and somewhat complicated family. We had sat down between them during fights and taught them to consider one another’s perspectives. We had modeled finding solutions to disagreements over space or objects. We had taught them alternatives to physically expressing anger, like yelling “I am so mad” and “I don’t like you right now” or retreating to a safe space. When things went wrong, they had the tools to at least begin to look inside themselves and ask, Why am I angry? What’s really wrong? What can I change about this, and what do I have to live with? I thought we’d reached the “no need to intervene” stage.

  The sudden and continuous running fight between my daughters, though, felt like something new. It didn’t feel like a run-of-the-mill little kid spat. It was vicious and it broke out at almost every opportunity, which is to say every time the girls (who shared a hockey team, a school, and a bedroom) were together. It was so constant, so loud, so abusive, so often physical, although in a minor way—tearing things out of one another’s hands, slamming doors in faces. I didn’t know what to do. In general, they’d all gotten along pretty well before. I’d never seen anything like this.

  It wouldn’t be putting it too strongly to say that I panicked.

  I took it all personally. Sometimes I sided with my older daughter, especially if she wanted to be left alone. I, too, notice that her younger sister is not a person who lets you be alone when she’s in the room. She hums, she sings a little, she moves noisily. She likes people to know she’s there.

  And sometimes I sided with my younger daughter. Why did my big girl have to be so mean all of a sudden? Why could she not include her sister in things like baking cookies with her friend? And the bossiness! I, too, would make everyone late for hockey practice if I had my older daughter yelling at me like that.

  But mostly I was just so angry at them both, particularly on the day when I drove them for more than five hours to compete in a hockey tournament, which their team won—a victory they celebrated by dragging me into their loud, furious, pushing-and-shoving argument in the hallway outside the team locker room. I’m not sure I’ve ever been angrier or more embarrassed. And I just didn’t get it. How could they act this way? Did they not understand how lucky they were to have each other?

  I should step back here and tell you that I am an only child. That I had a sister, who died before I was born, and in spite of having had a great childhood with my loving and fun parents, I believed that siblings were something I always wanted. That we adopted our younger daughter into our family when she was nearly four, because I’d always wanted a big family, and that we chose to adopt a little girl, back when it was an amorphous choice instead of the inevitability we now see, in part so that my older daughter would have a sister.

  This is not, any of it, even a little relevant when it came to helping the eleven- and twelve-year-olds in front of me find a way back to their previously loving relationship. It is, however, why it took me so long to get this right.

  The hockey tournament proved to be something of a turning point for the girls. They, too, were embarrassed. Some of their teammates took them to task; others were, at a minimum, irritated by the fuss. In the car later, they were able to talk about some of what was bothering them beyond each other, things to do with the team and other changes. They had been listening to us. They admitted taking out frustrations on each other that couldn’t be safely released anywhere else. They promised to try harder. In retrospect, I can see that they meant it.

  But I couldn’t let it go. I ended that five-hour late-night drive still fuming. I swore I would never take them to another tournament. I talked about it endlessly, conversations not centered on “What should I do?” but “Can you believe what awful little jerks they were?” At home, I started to berate them for fighting all the time, even when they weren’t. “Come to the general store,” I’d say, “if you can keep from fighting long enough in the car to do it.” “Don’t let the girls sit together,” I’d say in a restaurant. “I can’t take it.” They had been so horrible! They were ruining our lives! Everything was awful, and I could not imagine what I was going to do about it.

  Underneath it all, I was frightened. What if this never stopped? What would it mean for our family’s long-term happiness if two of us couldn’t stand to be near each other?

  It was about then, a little desperate and a lot miserable, that I (while wondering whether I was able to write a book about happier parents at all) started to work on this chapter. I read research studies, I talked to parents about how their own children fought and how they kept their own emotions in check when they handled it. I consulted the old books on my bookshelf and ordered new ones. I called the authors of those books and other experts besides. And I realized, slowly, that what I was seeing between my girls wasn’t some huge, family-destroying Shakespearean drama, but just ordinary sibling stuff that I needed to approach in an ordinary way.

  They were getting older, and they needed to find a new way to live with one another. They needed to push each other away in order to find their way to a relationship that wasn’t just dictated by all that forced togetherness. And I needed to let it happen.

  We had done enough conflict resolution. I didn’t need to get in between them and make sure they heard and understood each other. I certainly didn’t need to take sides. I needed to back off. If you see something, don’t always say something. I let them bicker without starting in on my “you girls always ruin everything” speech. I let most of the still-regular arguments about who could be in the bedroom or who had been first to set up at the table to do homework play out without my stomping over to join in. If I had something to offer I said it to them afterward, separately. (To the older: “Thank you for not engaging with your little sister when she was mad about her chores earlier”; to the younger: “You know you weren’t really upset with your sister but at yourself, right? Let’s try to find a better way to handle that.”) I recited the words of Rob Jones, a father of two and one of five siblings himself: “They get along well, and they fight well.” There was nothing wrong.

  And things were, rather suddenly and very distinctly, better. Not perfect, bu
t better. As I put the finishing touches on this chapter, they’re still better. They still argue over the right to be alone in the bedroom and whether the younger is intentionally eavesdropping on the older and her friends (she is). But they’ve returned to where they were before, mostly getting along fine, frequently doing things together, occasionally helping one another out and just generally being sisters. When my younger daughter broke her arm the night before school started this year, she begged her sister to come to the hospital with her, and my older daughter dropped her plans for pre-packing the perfect backpack and got into the backseat to try every possible distraction for the long drive to the emergency room.

  It turned out okay. I won’t lie to you—I really didn’t think it would. But it did.

  Increasing the Joy

  Addressing the conflict is only part of increasing your family happiness when it comes to siblings. We don’t just want them to be able to fight fairly (and ideally fight less). We also want them to grow up as close and loving as their personalities allow. The goal isn’t just not-so-bad. Some of that comes naturally, just with proximity and familiarity. All their lives, your siblings will share experiences no one else has (among other things, being raised by you). They’ll have a history and a bond that’s unique. But we don’t want to rely on happenstance to build that into a strong lifelong relationship. How can we actively encourage the good times that really count?

  ACCEPT THE NEGATIVE

  Ironically enough, feeling happier about your children’s relationship means accepting some of the bad—in particular, their negative thoughts and words about one another. New big brothers and big sisters will often say they “hate” the baby. Older siblings will “hate” one another. They have entire dossiers of why their sibling stinks, including every crime ever committed by the one against the other and a whole lot more besides.

  “Accept the feelings, but not the behaviors,” says Shumaker. “Don’t be scared of the jealousy and the fear and the desires. If we’re honest, adults feel those things, too, especially about new babies. Accept the emotion—and don’t say, ‘Oh, I know deep down you love the baby’—and they’ll grow to like and love each other a lot faster.”

  Accepting the negative emotions, and allowing your child to express them to you without registering shock and horror, also defuses them. Resenting a new sister, or furious anger at an older brother, can be big feelings for small people. If your child can say “I hate him!” to you and not be kicked out of the family—or even get a response like “It’s so hard when the baby needs me and you want me, too,” or “I know, my brother used to leave me out when he had a friend over, and it made me so mad”—that means it’s okay to have those thoughts, and it’s possible to get past them.

  LET RELATIONSHIPS EVOLVE

  People, even children, change. My daughters were having a lot of negative feelings about each other (to say the least). I needed to learn to let them have and express those feelings without making things worse. When I left them to work out as much as they could together, I also helped them see that the feelings were both okay and transient.

  KEEP THE FUN RATIO HIGH

  Christine Carter, author of Raising Happiness: 10 Simple Steps for More Joyful Kids and Happier Parents, suggests we actively establish a measurable goal for good times. “Positive interactions between siblings need to outnumber negative ones by about five to one,” she writes. She bases her theory on our human tendency to remember negative experiences more readily than positive ones, and on research into marriages and high-performance work teams that shows that when positive actions and words outweigh negative ones at about that ratio, all kinds of partnerships are more successful.

  So without adding things to your schedule, do try to ensure that your days and weeks include plenty of time for siblings, no matter what the age gap, to enjoy one another. Offer them extra time with something they like to do together that you usually limit (in our case, that’s video games). Make sure there isn’t always a friend over when all siblings are free. Instead of bedtime, establish “kidtime,” when all siblings need to be in shared bedrooms, upstairs, or however your house divides into kid and adult territory, and leave them to it for half an hour or so before starting the nightly routine or telling older kids to turn the lights out.

  Encourage the kind of family storytelling that turns bad times into funny memories. My oldest son once accidentally swung his tiny sister’s face into the corner of a bathroom cabinet, resulting in a fantastically colorful black eye that started out as a lump the size of a Ping-Pong ball. He was eight years old at the time, and he thought he had dislocated her entire eyeball. We still laugh about it. Vacation disasters, very silly arguments, the time one child was accidentally left at the grocery store—those can all become family lore. I suspect “the hockey tournament where we almost killed each other” will end up on that list, too, eventually. It doesn’t necessarily have to have felt good at the time to become a good memory later.

  GIVE THEM SIBLING TIME THAT ISN’T FAMILY TIME

  Make sure your children have time together without you. Encourage their collective independence. Send them in pairs on “missions” in the grocery store or as a pack to the movies. Drop them off at mini-golf or the library. On vacation or at an airport, challenge them to try something with each other, but without you. Remind them to look out for each other, and not just older after younger, either. Make sure they’re all in this together and, as they grow up, support any effort they make to stay that way.

  On their Happier podcast, sisters Gretchen Rubin and Elizabeth Craft often talk about how their parents financially supported their relationship by paying for them to visit one another once Gretchen and then Elizabeth (who is five years younger) had moved out of the house. They credit the plane and train tickets they couldn’t easily afford with helping them develop a close relationship as young adults and, later, as adults.

  SEE THE GOOD TIMES

  Our children don’t have to be happy to be together every minute of every day for things to be pretty good. If children spend, as one statistic I cited earlier in the chapter suggested, on average ten minutes of every hour together fighting, that still leaves fifty other minutes. That’s not too bad, really. When you stop looking at the ten minutes (the trees), you can see the rest of the hour (the forest). Your job is to appreciate the forest even though your inclination is just to cut down that one tree.

  SOAK UP THE GOOD

  Just sit and watch and absorb while your kids are making brownies together. When your younger child asks the older for advice about a school activity, relish their ability to help one another. Even if they’ve ganged up against you, appreciate it. They’ve got each other’s backs. That’s what you wanted. Revel in it.

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  SPORTS AND ACTIVITIES: FUN FOR EVERYONE, EXCEPT WHEN THEY’RE NOT

  Let me first say this about your child and sports and other non-school activities, like music, chess, or dance: if your child participates in any extracurricular beyond the most introductory level, it is all but certain that you will, at some point, do something you would once have thought was crazy.

  You will drive a twelve-year-old ten hours in a single day to compete or perform.

  You will serve family dinner in the car three nights a week for three months straight.

  You will spend more than your parents spent on your first bike for a costume, instrument, or piece of equipment, even if money is tight.

  You will allow your child to skip school for a game, show, or match.

  You will wonder if you’re crazy to even consider doing otherwise, because you will be surrounded by other parents all doing the exact same thing.

  When you do your first crazy thing, when you open that gate, maybe you will think, if you think about it at all, that it’s not you. That something has changed in youth sports and other activities, and that fighting the onslaught of new, expensive opportunities along with more and l
onger practices and seasons is like fighting the tide.

  You’re right. It’s them. But it’s also a little bit . . . us.

  What Goes Wrong, or How the Fun Was Lost

  If your child’s sports and activities are contributing to your sense of being overloaded and unhappy, the most likely culprit is also the most obvious: there are too many of them, and they’re overwhelming your family time, not to mention your own. There are other possibilities, too. You may really dislike the process, location, or parental expectations for some things. Your child may not really be engaged, which means that every session or practice becomes a battle. Or the timing could simply be off, making something that isn’t in itself too much or too hard feel really, really difficult.

  For most of us, though, the most obvious issue is the place to start. Many middle- and upper-class families put significant amounts of time and money into sports and activities for children. More than 90 percent of American kids now engage in organized sports at some point during childhood or adolescence. They spend more time on those sports and other activities, too—unsupervised “free” playtime has decreased for all children since 1981 and most significantly for the children of better-educated parents.

  At the same time, the time parents spend with their children has increased, but not necessarily in obviously fun ways. In their paper “The Rug Rat Race,” economists and parents Garey and Valerie Ramey looked closely at time-use diaries from 1965 to 2007 and found that the amount of time parents spend chauffeuring children to and from activities as well as organizing and attending those activities is up, in particular for kids with college-educated parents. Children with less-educated parents, they wrote, spend most of their free time playing with friends and relatives in their neighborhood, unsupervised by adults, while for the better-educated adults, supervision is the name of the game. Sociologist Annette Lareau calls this “concerted cultivation.” Parents who can do so devote significant time and effort to their children’s activities, enrolling them, scheduling them, preparing their equipment, and getting them from place to place. Meanwhile, married parents, busy dividing and conquering in the name of their children’s development, spend less time than ever with their spouses: just 9.1 hours a week in 2000 compared to 12.4 in 1975. That’s 171 fewer hours a year. That’s a lot.