Siblings and the Fights That Aren’t Fair

It’s early on a Saturday morning, and for the third time already your eight-year-old has taken the small blue car her four-year-old brother was playing with, held it above her head and watched him dissolve into the kind of crying that goes on long past the original injury. You’ve been making toast and haven’t seen how it started. You hear only the second half: the wailing, your daughter insisting in an aggrieved voice that it was her car first, and your son running across the room with his face screwed up the way four-year-olds’ faces go when the world has been unfair to them.

By now you’ve broken up the same fight more times than you can count. You’ve tried praise, consequences, a family meeting and making everyone say sorry. By lunchtime you’re in the loo with the door locked, wondering whether it’s normal to love your children so much and have so little patience for the noise they make at each other.

It is normal, and parents bring this to us often. Sibling fighting is the most reliably exhausting part of family life. If you’ve decided by Wednesday that you’re being asked to referee a war you never declared, you’re right about that, and it doesn’t mean you’re failing.

What is actually happening

In most families, a child’s relationship with her brother or sister is the longest relationship she will ever have. It’s also the first one in which she has had to share love she didn’t yet know could run out. An older child welcomes the new baby expecting someone small and sweet she can love whenever she likes. What actually arrives is a competitor for the attention of the two people whose attention used to be all hers. Each child, in her own way, is asking the same question: am I still the one, and am I enough?

Most sibling fights are this question coming out into the open. The row over the blue car is usually about whose turn it is to be seen, and whether there’s only so much attention to go round in this family. If you respond to what the fight looks like on the surface, you get pulled into acting as judge. If you hear the question behind it, you can eventually have a different conversation.

A great deal of sibling rivalry is a normal part of development. Children fight in proportion to their age difference, to how close they are, and to how fairly attention is being shared between them at the moment. None of that can be prevented, and it isn’t a sign that your family is doing something wrong. Siblings who never fight are not, in the research or in the families we see, the ones with the warmest relationship as adults. Fighting is partly how the relationship gets built.

What it is doing to you

By the third row of the morning, you’re involved too: your own nervous system is producing a surge of stress, and that reaction often has a history.

The most useful single exercise we do with parents on this subject is to ask what their own experience as a sibling was like. If you were the older one, you’ll often feel a particular fury when your older child takes something from the younger; you see yourself at eight, being told to share. If you were the younger one, a different fury comes up when the older one shuts the younger one out; you see yourself at five, on the wrong side of a closed bedroom door. If you were an only child, you’ll have your own kind of bewilderment, and you may be the parent most surprised by how visceral the fighting feels.

Your own history tells you why a row about a blue car feels louder to you than a row about a blue car should. When you’re stirred up, you reach for the script you were given as a child, and it tends to be about fairness: “Be fair to your sister.” “Stop being so unfair to your brother.” A lot hangs on that word, and much of it shouldn’t.

Philippa Perry’s The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read is the book we keep giving to parents dealing with this. Its chapters on the patterns we inherit from our own brothers and sisters are the clearest writing we know on what happens to a parent when her children fight.

Fair is not the same as equal

When parents say fair, they often mean equal: equal slices of cake, equal spending on birthdays, equal attention measured to the minute. You don’t want either child to feel less loved. The trouble is that treating two children of different ages and different needs equally is itself a small injustice. A four-year-old whose bedtime is pushed back to match the eight-year-old’s, for the sake of equality, is being short-changed on sleep. An eight-year-old whose Saturday plans are rearranged around the four-year-old’s nap is being short-changed on her own life.

The idea we find parents respond to is equity, not equality: each child gets what she needs. The four-year-old needs the early bedtime; the eight-year-old needs the later one, and the half-hour with you when she gets to be older. The four-year-old needs your hand at the front door; the eight-year-old needs the walk to school when, for a little while, she’s the one with the news. Both get what fits them, and it isn’t the same.

In our experience, children want visible evidence that being treated differently isn’t a verdict on them. What feels unfair is a difference that comes without a matching piece of attention. An eight-year-old who is treated according to her age, and told that this is why, doesn’t feel cheated. An eight-year-old who is treated according to her age and not told is the one composing a manifesto in the back of the car.

Figure

Along with Philippa Perry, the book we send parents to most often on this subject is Faber and Mazlish’s classic Siblings Without Rivalry. It has a gift for the small changes of wording that turn a sibling row down by twenty percent. Its advice not to compare children, not to label them (“she’s the sporty one, he’s the bookish one”) and not to make one of them apologise on cue works surprisingly well once you’ve tried it for a fortnight. It’s forty years old and reads as slightly dated, but it has earned its place.

What to do, and what not to do

The most useful single thing you can do on a Saturday morning like this is what Faber and Mazlish call describing what you see: “I notice two children, one car, both wanting it.” Say it calmly, without a verdict, before you rule on anything. The children hear that they’ve been seen, and things calm down a little. From there, step out of the role of judge: “You two are going to have to work out who has it for the next ten minutes.” Then walk back to the toast.

The urge to step in and rule is strong, and it’s almost always wrong. If you make the ruling, hand the car to the younger child and tell the older one to share, you’re teaching three things at once. The younger child learns that crying brings a parent who takes things from the older one. The older child learns that being older means being on the wrong side of every dispute. Both learn that only an adult can answer the question of how to share. You don’t want them to learn any of these.

The exception is genuine physical danger, or the dynamic the next section addresses. In those cases, intervene immediately. Most sibling fights aren’t like that, and once you can tell the difference, you can let most of them run. Family Lives, whose confidential helpline we send parents to often when the question is about the family system rather than the child, has practical material on sibling rivalry. It’s the place to look if you want reassurance that you can let a row go on a bit longer than feels comfortable.

Some things rarely help. A family meeting where everyone has to say how they feel about each other is one, and charts and stickers that reward good sharing are another. So is asking the older child to set a good example for the younger, which is asking an eight-year-old to do an adult’s job. And there’s the pet name (the responsible one, the dramatic one, the easy one) that, once spoken, hardens into a role the child plays for the next decade.

What helps more is fifteen minutes alone with each child, regularly, when she gets to be the only one in the room. That might be an afternoon after school each week that is always hers, a walk to the corner shop where she’s the one talking and you’re listening, or a bedtime she doesn’t have to share. A child who can count on having her own time is less inclined to fight over the time she shares.

In many families it also helps to use an “I noticed” sentence. Say it in passing, without fuss and not at the table: “I noticed you let your sister have the car for a long time before you took it back. That was generous of you.” It’s the opposite of a lecture about sharing. Small, specific praise like this gets through in a way that general praise doesn’t.

When the fight is something else

Most sibling conflict, as we’ve said, is a normal part of development. Some is not, and the parent we are most concerned about is the one who has been treating it as normal for too long.

The picture to take seriously is the persistent, asymmetric dynamic where one child consistently aggresses against the other, the aggression is not reciprocated, and the smaller or quieter child has begun to retreat from the rooms her sibling is in. Bullying inside a family looks like bullying outside one. The targeted child becomes wary, then withdrawn, then sometimes flat. She stops sitting in the room when her sibling is sitting in it. She develops physical complaints on the days her sibling is at home. None of this is a stage. She is telling you, in the only language available to her, that her home does not feel safe to her in the way it should.

Scapegoating is the related family pattern. When the adults are under stress, a family can settle into an arrangement where one child gets more of the household’s irritability than the others, and the other children, taking their cue from the adults, follow suit. The child being scapegoated is rarely the one with the most difficult behaviour; more often, she’s the one whose temperament is least convenient to the family as things stand. Fixing it is the adults’ job, not the child’s. The pattern changes when the adults notice they have been doing it, and stop.

If you suspect either picture, do not wait. The conversation to have is between the adults, first, about what you have each been noticing. Then a conversation with the child being targeted, sideways and slow. Then, where the picture warrants it, a family counsellor; the BACP and NCPS directories list counsellors working with family systems, and the NSPCC parenting pages have practical material on sibling aggression that has tipped into something more serious. Anna Freud’s resources on family dynamics are the more clinically substantial pointer when the parent wants reading from a research-anchored source.

At different ages

Sibling conflict changes noticeably with age, and what you do needs to change with it.

If your children are between four and seven. Fights at this age are short and loud, and almost always about who has something right now. Describe what’s happening without ruling on it: “I see one child upset, one child holding the car. You two need to find a way through this.” Then walk away, and the fight will end. You’re supporting a partnership the two of them will be in for the next sixty years.

If your children are between seven and nine. At this age fairness becomes something they can count. They count slices, time minutes and add up what was spent. Don’t try to argue them out of the counting, because they’ll win. Talk about difference instead: “You’re not the same age, so you don’t get the same bedtime. You’ll get the later bedtime when you’re her age, and she had the longer story when she was your age.” Naming the difference is most of it. Give the older one a small privilege that comes with being older, visible and reliable, and the counting dies down.

If your children are between nine and eleven. By now the fighting has a memory. Each child can produce, on demand, a five-minute history of unfairness going back to a Christmas three years ago. Kindly refuse to be the historian: “I’m not going to settle who started it. I’m going to ask both of you to be in different rooms for ten minutes, and then we’ll all eat together.” The cooling-off is what helps, and a forensic enquiry into who did what only inflames things.

If your children include an early secondary, eleven to thirteen. The eleven-year-old who would have wrestled with her younger sister last year is now contemptuous of her. The younger child takes the contempt as rejection and pushes harder, and the older one responds with more contempt. Protect the younger child’s dignity without scolding the older one: “She is six. She is doing six. You were six.” Say it calmly, once, then leave the room. Alongside this, give the eleven-year-old a part of her life that is her own, kept separate from her younger sibling, suited to her age and recognised as hers.

If your children are in mid to late secondary, thirteen and beyond. Oddly, teenage siblings often fight less than they did at nine, because their lives have started to run on different tracks. The fights that remain are louder but less frequent. Keep the family routines, like supper or Sunday, in which the two of them have to spend a little time together, without expecting them to be close. Forcing them to bond doesn’t work at this age; being around each other for practical reasons sometimes does, slowly.

The longer arc

In the long run, most sibling rows are a forgotten part of childhood. Children who fought on Saturday mornings grow up into adults who text each other when their mother has had a bad week. The fights are the noisy part of a much longer relationship, most of which happens in moments you barely notice.

What you’re building, even on a Saturday like this one, is two children who will each have someone in their adult lives who knew them at five. Only a sibling can give them that, and in most cases it survives almost everything you fear it might not.

In the meantime, it’s fine to find it exhausting. Knowing they’ll love each other in thirty years doesn’t make this morning’s row any less loud, or you any less tired. The two of them, down on the floor, are slowly becoming each other’s longest relationship.

The toast isn’t burnt, and the car has somehow ended up on the sofa with neither of them. In a few days everyone but you will have forgotten this morning, and you can let it go too.

NOTES

1. Perry, Philippa. The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did). Penguin Life, 2019. Perry’s account of the rupture-and-repair cycle and of catching ourselves in our own reactivity.
2. Faber, Adele & Mazlish, Elaine. Siblings Without Rivalry. Norton, 1987. The classic Faber/Mazlish handbook on sibling dynamics without the parent triangulating.

Where to go further

Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish, Siblings Without Rivalry We mention it earlier in this chapter. It’s forty years old and still the clearest single book we know on the small changes of wording that turn a sibling row down by twenty percent.

Philippa Perry, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did) We mention this one earlier too. It’s the right book for parents who can see their own history as a sibling being stirred up by their children’s rows, and who want to understand what they have inherited.