How to Deal with Sibling Rivalry

Written by Anthony Kane, MD

Many families with ADHD children have to deal with sibling rivalry. Here are some helpful suggestions for managing sibling rivalry.

Introduction

There are many new issues facing parents today. Sibling rivalry is not one of them. It is as old as Cain and Abel.

Sibling rivalry is universal, but more importantly sibling rivalry is normal. More than that current research shows that sibling rivalry is a sign of a healthy family. One of the sign of a dysfunctional home or a home where there is a lot of stress is that there is no sibling rivalry. In these homes the children tend to cling together for security.

So if sibling rivalry is universal and it is found in normal homes, it must serve a purpose.

The Benefits of Sibling Rivalry

One of the main benefits that sibling rivalry teaches children is conflict resolution. Life is full of conflict. As adults we have developed skills to resolve these conflicts in an effective and civil manner. How did we develop these skills? We learned this by pounding our little brother. We learned this by fighting with our big sister.

You can learn certain skills by arguing with your parents, but it is not the same. Through your parents you learn how to deal with authority. But siblings are peers. Learning how to relate to them properly prepares us to relate to our friends and our spouses. You can only learn conflict resolution when there is conflict. Sibling rivalry provides a safe and supervised haven for children to learn how to resolve their disagreements with others.

The second important lesson that we learn through sibling rivalry is that the world is not fair. This is a very important and bitter lesson to learn. There is always some who will do better than you. There is always someone who is richer, who is smarter, who has better behaved children, who has a happier marriage. Life is full of inequities. We may not like it but most of us have come to terms with these inequities. Where did we learn to accept that everything is not always distributed evenly? We learned it from our siblings.

How to Manage Sibling Rivalry

Now that we have a framework for what children accomplish through sibling rivalry, we can understand better how we as parents can use our children's relationships with each other to help them grow into healthy normal adults.

How to Oversee the Conflict Resolution

Since the purpose of sibling rivalry is to learn how to resolve conflicts with others, you should as much as possible let your children work out disputes themselves. You should direct them when necessary, but the idea is to give them as little direction as possible.

What You Should Do

Create a situation where the motivation is to resolve their differences. There are times they can't work it out- so you coach them give them ideas how to compromise but the best thing is to have them resolve it themselves.

For example, say they are fighting over a toy. One child says he had it first. The other says he didn't get to play with it at all yesterday and now it's his turn.

Who is right? That is impossible to say. So what could you do? Tell them you don't know who is right about the toy, but if they are fighting about it they are both wrong. Then take it away from them and tell them that when they work out a way of sharing it they can have it back. You will be surprised how fast most children will be able to work out something.

What You Should Not Do

Do not try to figure out who started it. In most cases you will never resolve this. More than that, any attempt to figure out who is the aggressor almost always makes things worse.

Usually both children are at fault. Fighting with someone else is wrong. Once there is a fight they are automatically both wrong. What caused the fight becomes secondary.

What to Watch Out For

Your job as a parent is not to solve your children's problems, but to teach them how to solve them themselves. They must learn to make compromises. As much as possible they should be the ones who work out the compromise. However, there are some things you should watch for to be sure they are doing a good job.