Sibling Rivalry

Watch as Greg explains a simple definition of Sibling Rivalry. Notice the keyword: enough.

Timestamps:

01:23 Sibling Rivalry found online in lists of top things that annoy parents, and those definitions.

02:38 The real definition of Sibling Rivalry.

04:26 First reason academics give for Sibling Rivalry.

06:18 Second reason academics give for Sibling Rivalry.

07:17 Third reason academics give for Sibling Rivalry.

08:04 Love never mentioned in these scholarly articles. Children need to feel unconditionally loved.

09:39 Children who are unconditionally loved simply do not fight.

10:32 Once a child feels ENOUGH love from their parents, there is no competition.

Transcript:

In the parenting training I talked about a lot of childhood behaviors that can be distracting and destructive for children and the people around them: siblings, friends, teachers, YOU.

I chose to focus on certain unloving behaviors based on considerable experience with both children and their parents—having heard and become involved with thousands of stories and questions—but after the REPT was filmed, just for kicks I thought I’d check out some online lists of “Top Ten things kids do that are annoying,” or “Most troublesome behaviors in children.”

Definitions of Sibling Rivalry

Turns out that in the training we covered all the behaviors that parents report most often as problems with their kids. With the exception of ONE thing: sibling rivalry. In the Training, I never specifically used that term, which is fairly commonly used amongst child therapists. I almost thought, “How could I have missed this one?” But then I read what a great many articles and experts had to say, and I was glad that I DIDN’T deal with the subject in the Video Training, for two reasons:

1. The definitions of sibling rivalry varied a lot. They all distilled down to one thing: kids fighting with their siblings. There’s nothing novel there, and I’ve dealt with that subject a lot in the Parenting Training.
2. And throughout the Parenting Training, we did talk about the causes of conflict between children, as well as how to respond far more productively than we have been.

Sibling Rivalry Not a Separate Subject

In short, sibling rivalry isn’t really a separate subject from that of kids who just don’t feel unconditionally loved by their parents. That’s all sibling rivalry is—it’s NOT a separate subject—and we know the solution: lovingandteaching.

Then I thought, well, maybe I’m still premature in dismissing sibling rivalry as a subject, so I consulted the most-visited website on the subject that was written by pediatricians specializing in childhood behavior at a major medical school. I learned a couple of important things:

First, academics—the professors, not the concept of academics—are roughly as clueless about real people as I remembered they were all the way through medical school and surgical residency.

Examples of Academics Misunderstanding Sibling Rivalry

The website article started off by stating that “sibling rivalry is the jealousy, competition and fighting between brothers and sisters.” Not a bad start, but that’s all just a way of saying that kids argue and fight with each other. So then they wrote a long list of the REASONS for sibling rivalry. I will list only the top three:

1. First reason: “Each child is competing to define who they are as an individual. As they discover who they are, they try to find their own talents, activities, and interests.  They want to show that they are separate from their siblings.” No. That’s what is called academic gobbledygook. Behavioral science academics pretty much HAVE to make things sound complicated. If something were simple, we wouldn’t need the academics, and they couldn’t be called Doctor and Professor. Regrettably, I know what I’m talking about here, having been in that environment. The simpler truth is that no child gets up in the morning with a motivation to show that they’re separate from their siblings, as claimed by the professors. Kids have already figured all that out from the fact that they wear different clothes and inhabit different bodies and have different names and put different forks in their mouths. Kids are clever enough to figure out that they’re different from their siblings. They don’t need a competition to discover that.
2. Second reason on that web page about sibling rivalry: “Children feel they are getting unequal amounts of your attention, discipline, and responsiveness.” I’ve never met a child who sat around complaining about insufficient discipline compared to a sibling, but maybe there is such a child somewhere. Now, kids DO complain—in words and with their behavior—that they don’t get ENOUGH attention and responsiveness, but comparing the attention they get is a ruse—a distraction—from the real problem: getting ENOUGH of what they need.
3. Third reason (for SR): “Children may feel their relationship with their parents is threatened by the arrival of a new baby.” Maybe, but that’s not the reason kids fight. They actually don’t think words like “threatened” when a baby is born. They think mostly words like, “What is this little rat doing in MY house?”

"Love" Left Out in the Reasons for Sibling Rivalry

Those were the top three reasons listed for sibling rivalry, which brings me to the second thing I noticed from devouring this scholarly article: Notice that the word “love” (the one thing kids need more than anything) wasn’t found anywhere in the top three reasons—nor was it found in the entire remainder of the list of like fifteen reasons for Sibling Rivalry.

Children need to feel unconditionally loved. They don’t get it. No news there. Without the love they need like air, they’re in unbearable pain, and then they lash out at whoever is closest—notably their siblings, who are close and also much easier to fight with than their parents—who are bigger and stronger. Sibling rivalry is not more complicated than that.

How do I know? Because I’ve known a number of children now who have been raised with sufficient unconditional love from their parents, as have their siblings, and these children simply don’t fight. (I know, unbelievable to people who haven’t seen such children.) They don’t argue. They don’t feel threatened by each other. They don’t struggle to prove that they’re separate from their siblings. They don’t feel jealous or competitive.

Getting Enough Real Love Stops Sibling Rivalry

 Why? Because they have ENOUGH of what they need most—the love of their parents. They have ENOUGH Real Love from their parents. THAT is the key word: enough. Once you feel enough unconditional love, there is no competition. You don’t care how much other kids get. In fact, you don’t quantify Real Love. It’s fairly binary: either you get enough, or you don’t.

Getting enough love is much like getting enough food. If you are full and satisfied after eating a meal, do you look around the table and feel jealous—a condition of rivalry—with someone who ate MORE than you did? Ridiculous even to hear such a thought. No, having enough is enough, and after that, competition makes no sense at all.

So, to be blunt, sibling rivalry—if we accept the term at all—is about a lack of love, and the solution is to love and teach, many examples of which are found in the Parenting Training. Not complicated.