Sibling Relationships When Everyone Is Home All Day

Two of my kids fight at least once a week, and I have been working on their relationship, on purpose, for years, and it still does not always come out on top.

I say that first because every article about sibling relationships is written as if the author has solved it, and I haven’t, and I don’t think it’s a thing you solve. These two are very alike, which is the problem. If one of them is reading, the other one has to be reading too, in the same chair, or has to point out that they were reading first. If one is doing something, the other inserts themselves into it or claims the idea. It’s a loop, and both of them can start it and both of them can keep it going, and I have watched it run for a long time now. What I do with it, what I don’t do, and why the loop is the most important thing happening in my house: that’s this essay.

Why sibling relationships matter (and why that’s the wrong first question)

The usual answer is that siblings are the longest relationship most people will ever have, longer than parents, longer than a marriage, and that a good one is a lifelong source of support. That’s true and it’s also the kind of thing that makes a parent of two fighting eight-year-olds feel worse, so here is a different answer.

A sibling is the only person your child will ever practice conflict with every single day, at full intensity, with no escape and no option to end the relationship. Friends can be dropped. Classmates rotate. A sibling is there at breakfast tomorrow no matter what happened at dinner. That makes the sibling relationship the one place in a childhood where a kid has to learn, for real and repeatedly, how to want something another person also wants and work out what happens next. Peter Gray’s work on age-mixed play (I’ve written about it here) shows how much children of different ages give each other when they play without an adult running it: the younger ones stretch, the older ones learn to lead and bend. Siblings are the age-mixed group that comes with the house. The fighting isn’t a bug in that system. It’s the curriculum.

The cycle, and what I do with it

The weekly fight, from where I sit: one of them is doing a thing. The other one notices, and something in them cannot stand that the first one is doing the thing, so they either join it uninvited or announce that they were doing it first. The first one objects. Voices go up. And at that point both of them are instigating, because the one who was “wronged” is now escalating as hard as the one who started it, and each of them is completely sure the other one is the problem.

What I don’t do is referee. I don’t figure out who started it, I don’t assign a fault, and I don’t separate them into winner and loser, because the second I do that I’ve taught them that the point of a fight is to get the adult on your side, and they’ll both get better at that than at solving anything. I also don’t pit them against each other with comparison, ever, in either direction, because “your sister doesn’t do this” is a sentence that poisons a relationship for a decade.

What I do is name the loop, out loud, to both of them, often. We talk a lot about the cycle of their relationship: that the two of them go round and round, that each one’s move is a response to the other one’s move, and that the loop only stops when one of them chooses not to take the next turn. Not the one who started it. Either one. I ask them what’s actually happening, in the moment, and I make them answer, and then I hand the solving back. What are you going to do about it? Not what should she do; what are you going to do. The work is helping them see why it’s happening, in real time, and leaving the fix to them. Some weeks that works. Some weeks it doesn’t and I’m back the next week saying the same thing, and that’s the job, and anyone who tells you there’s a trick that makes it stop is selling you something.

Where the blame goes

A lot of parents feel like their kids’ fighting is a verdict on them, and it isn’t. Sibling relationships are starving in most houses for reasons that have nothing to do with the parents’ skill.

Kids who are in school seven hours a day and in activities until dinner see each other for about ninety tired minutes, and the relationship gets built out of the worst ninety minutes of everyone’s day. Age-graded schooling teaches them that their real peers are the kids their own age and that a sibling three years off is a nuisance. Separate bedrooms, separate screens and separate schedules mean they can avoid each other entirely, which feels like peace and is actually the relationship failing to form. And the advice industry tells you to referee, to use scripts, to run a feelings chart, which keeps you in the middle of every conflict and keeps them from ever practicing without you.

The homeschool version of this problem is the opposite and it’s the one I live. Everyone is home all day. There’s no seven-hour break from each other. The relationship gets all of the hours, good and bad, and so it has more conflict in it and more of everything else too. I’ll take that trade every time, but I won’t pretend the conflict isn’t real.

What a good sibling relationship actually looks like

Not peace. Repair. A good sibling relationship is one where they fight, and then an hour later they’re running the mud kitchen together, and nobody made them. It’s one where the fight gets shorter over the years because they’ve learned where the loop is and how to step out of it, and where neither of them thinks the other one is the villain, because nobody ever told them so. It’s one with a lot of unsupervised time in it, because that’s where the practice happens, and a parent who is nearby and mostly not involved.

If you want to help it along, give them more time together with less of you in it, which is the opposite of the instinct. Stop refereeing and start naming: “You two are in the loop again. What’s happening?” Protect the things that are theirs alone, a project, a book, a corner, so that not everything has to be shared, and then hold the line that the rest is. Never compare them. And lower your standard from “they get along” to “they can repair,” because that’s the skill that will still matter when they’re forty and you’re not there.

One thing

The next time two of yours start the loop, don’t ask who started it. Ask each of them what they’re going to do next, and then leave the room.

The thing I hear most from homeschooling parents is that the hardest part isn’t the academics, it’s everyone being under one roof all day. That’s a lot of what I’m building The Common Room for, a secular homeschooling community I’m opening later this year. I also write every week; you can find me on Instagram or join the list.

Sources

• Gray P, “The Special Value of Children’s Age-Mixed Play,” American Journal of Play 3(4), 2011, pp. 500–522. Link