Sibling relationships are some of the longest-lasting and most influential relationships in our lives, but they’re also filled with complexity. Dr. Jonathan Caspi, a renowned expert on sibling relationships, is breaking down the fascinating science behind sibling dynamics and sharing actionable advice for parents.
In this episode we explore:
- The surprising science behind why if you give two siblings and two strangers personality tests, the siblings wouldn’t be any more similar than the strangers.
- The importance of neutrality in parental interventions with siblings and how this can prevent feelings of favoritism and resentment.
- Practical strategies for managing sibling conflict: Like what to say in the heat of the moment to support their problem-solving skills, what to focus on (and what to ignore) to build closeness and empathy, and how to know it’s time to get involved vs. when to let them work it out themselves, and more!
- How to respond if your child struggles when you bring a new baby home with methods that foster closeness and decrease rivalry.
- Insider versus outsider status: How parents can unintentionally create sibling rivalry, and what to do instead.
- The vital importance of parental regulation and how to stay calm when our “mama bear” instincts are triggered.
Whether you’re trying to navigate sibling squabbles, encourage connection, or simply understand the dynamics at play in your own family, this episode is packed with fascinating insights and practical tools you won’t want to miss!
LEARN MORE ABOUT DR. JONATHAN CASPI:
READ DR. JONATHAN’S BOOK:
📚 Sibling Aggression: Assessment and Treatment
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ADDITIONAL REFERENCES AND RESOURCES:
- Research Study: Why are siblings so different?
CHECK OUT ADDITIONAL PODCAST EPISODES YOU MAY LIKE:
🎧 Getting on the same page as your partner in parenting
Click here to read the full transcript
Dr. Jonathan (00:00):
Closeness is incredibly important for sibling relationships. If you take a look at the research, there’s so many developmental benefits. Sibling closeness is associated with better peer relationships, better academic performance, better self-esteem, less mental health challenges in adulthood. It’s related to happier marriages and other romantic relationships and having more friendships. Believe it or not, it’s linked to better health and even longevity.
Dr. Sarah (00:34):
The dynamics between siblings plays such a significant role in shaping who our kids become and how they navigate future relationships. Yet as parents knowing how to foster positive sibling bonds while managing what can sometimes feel like endless conflict can feel so daunting, which is why I am so excited to have internationally recognized sibling expert Dr. Jonathan Caspi joining me today. Dr. Caspi is a professor of Family Science and Human Development at Montclair State University, has been a family therapist for over 30 years, and his fourth book, Raising Loving Siblings is now available wherever books are sold. In this episode, Dr. Caspi shares strategies to prevent feelings of favoritism. He explains why sibling closeness can actually lead to more conflict and why that’s still okay. And also he discusses how to navigate some of the most common tension points like when a new baby enters the family, and so many more critical things to know when you have more than one child and you want them to get along. So whether you’re trying to navigate sibling fighting, encourage connection, or simply understand the dynamics that are playing out in your own family, this episode is packed with really fascinating insights and very practical tools that you will not want to miss.
(01:59):
Hi, I’m Dr. Sarah Bren, a clinical psychologist and mom of two. In this podcast, I’ve taken all of my clinical experience, current research on brain science and child psychology, and the insights I’ve gained on my own parenting journey and distilled everything down into easy to understand and actionable parenting insights. So you can tune out the noise and tune into your own authentic parenting voice with confidence and calm. This is Securely Attached.
(02:29):
Hello, welcome back to the securely attached podcast. Today we have Dr. Jonathan Caspi here with us. Thanks so much for being here.
Dr. Jonathan (02:40):
Thanks for inviting me. This is great.
Dr. Sarah (02:42):
I’m really excited for our conversation today. I have two kids and I know many, many parents have multiple children, and this idea of the messy parenthood life of siblings is so, it’s just top of mind. I don’t think I can go through a day without having to address the fact that my two kids are doing something within their relationship that needs a little attention. So I’m very excited to be talking to you about siblings today. Can you share a little bit with our listeners how you got into this sort of research on siblings? And you’ve written a number of books on the topic. Why is this so interesting? Why is this so compelling of a story for you?
Dr. Jonathan (03:35):
Yeah, it’s a really good question. When I was a doctoral student many years ago, when you’re in a PhD program, you have to read and read and read and read, and I had already had my graduate degree. I’d already been in practice as a therapist, and it crossed my readings came a couple of findings, which really took me by surprise, and one of them was that if you take a pair of siblings and you give them personality tests and psychological adjustment tests and with anxiety and depression, those kinds of things, and then you take two strangers off the street and you do the same thing, the siblings will be as different as the strangers. Or to put it another way, the strangers are as similar as the siblings. And I read that and I went, how could that be? Because siblings grow up typically with the same parents in the same house and the same socioeconomics, the same cultural traditions, the same food, the same, either maternal or paternal, depression and happiness, whether their parents are fighting or not, how could it be same?
(04:48):
And even genetics should explain some more similarity than strangers. And at the end of this article, which by the way was called Why Are Siblings so different? And it was written by a BioGene geneticist, it said something like, maybe somebody with a family perspective can answer this question, something like that, different language. And I went, Ooh, that sounds like something I would like to learn more about because it doesn’t make any sense. And so that sort of sent me on course to learn a lot more about siblings. And so if your listeners are surprised that I should say surprised by how different their siblings are from each other, it’s pretty typical because that’s how it works.
Dr. Sarah (05:34):
And it makes sense. I mean, I think there’s this sort of common story I hear among parents that you think when you have your first kid, there’s so many ways in which you think you are impacting and shaping and doing all the things, and that what you see in your child is a direct result to some degree of your parenting. And then you have your, and you’re like, oh, I’m doing all the same things, but these are totally different kids. And you realize it’s like having that second really hits that reality home. For sure. In my experience, my two are so different, and I definitely realized in having my second that a lot of the things that I had attribute to my parent child relationship with my son were actually just who he was and then my daughter is who she is. And I feel like that really becomes clear when you have multiple children.
Dr. Jonathan (06:31):
Oh yeah. It is amusing and it’s hair pulling at the same time.
Dr. Sarah (06:38):
And humbling for sure.
Dr. Jonathan (06:40):
And humbling, a lot of people have this idea that everything they do is parents makes all the difference with their children, and it actually only make some difference, which is either terrifying or very relieving because if much of this has to do with things that are not within the parenting behavior, that’s kind of a relief, right?
Dr. Sarah (07:11):
It is. To me, I feel like it took a lot of the pressure off, and I feel like I try to help parents see that too, that in general, I think we have been, especially our generation of parents, we’ve kind of, we’ve gotten a lot of implicit and explicit messaging that everything rides on you as a parent. You are shaping the whole path. And if you take one toe out of line, you are going to screw up your kid for life. And actually they are pretty solidly who they are, and your job is to just keep ’em safe and keep ’em moving forward and kind of be the bumpers, but you’re not crafting all that much.
Dr. Jonathan (07:53):
No, I totally agree. And actually the research bears that out. Parents are way less impactful than they think they are. And some of that has to do, and I don’t want to get too in the weeds here, but with the legacy of Freud and how moms in particular could screw up their kids, but that we’re a long way from there. And that’s really not what research is suggesting. We’re just not that impactful. I mean, we are, and we can do a lot of things to help our kids have good relationships with siblings and peers and those kinds of things, but temperamentally, whether somebody is kind of rowdy and the other one is very calm, has a lot to do with temperament, but it also has to do with who your sibling is because if you have a sibling who is more feisty and more out there, it tends to make you more withdrawn and more quiet and vice versa.
(08:50):
And so you see these kind of dynamics in sibling pairs in which they help to sort of co-create each other. And the answer to why siblings are so different is because the other one exists, right? Without the sibling, you’d be a completely different person. All of us would if we had different siblings. And the example I use just quickly is if you think about Michael Jordan, he was considered one of the greatest athletes that has ever existed. And in his family, he had a brother who was also a professional basketball player, but nobody ever talks about him. Nobody considers him to be the athlete of the family or he just doesn’t get couched that way. And so if Michael Jordan was never born, his brother would be the athlete and would grow up with that identity. And so just having somebody like that in proximity changes the whole definition of who you are.
Dr. Sarah (09:47):
Yeah, it’s really interesting. It makes me really think about how important it is to look at a family system as a whole and to understand how we can within the parent child dynamic and the siblings dynamic and all players at once, we’re all influencing the ways in which each person in the family system gets set into a role. And obviously that’s natural and it happens kind of totally organically, but there are also ways in which people can get really entrenched in a role that’s not serving the family system or not serving them. That’s where you can see a lot of tricky stuff happen in families where things start to deteriorate. But can you talk a little bit about that, how this works from a family systems lens and how we can get stuck in roles?
Dr. Jonathan (10:47):
Yeah, this is a great question and I love the fact that you brought up that we’re all connected and anything that we do in our families has impact on others and what others do has impact on us. And none of it just happens in a vacuum. So when our children, and I have three of them by the way, when our children act in particular ways, we can’t disconnect ourselves from what’s happening. It’s not just the child who is behaving in a particular way and that that’s particularly true when problems are longstanding because usually when a problem is longstanding, we’re in on it in some way. And so to get to siblings, and by the way, the book that I just wrote is a family systems perspective in a lot of ways it’s not solely, but it does bring a lot of that lens in there.
(11:39):
But one of the things that happens in families is that sibling fighting gets a lot of attention. So when we’re all, and it’s so hard to be a parent these days, and so we typically rely on siblings to entertain each other. So we put them in a room and we’re like, go play with each other. And then we go like, oh, good, I can wash the dishes or I can return those emails, and then it’s quiet for 10, 15 minutes and all of a sudden they’re screaming. And then that’s when parents decide like, oh, I got to get involved. And so they do, but they can only get involved in the middle of this conflict, which inadvertently gives it more attention.
(12:24):
And typically there’s a payoff for at least one of the kids. There’s something in it for them to do it right. And meanwhile you had 15, 20 minutes where they were playing so well together and that part doesn’t get any attention because we’re so busy with other things. And so when we do see our kids sharing and complimenting and playing nicely and doing those kind of prosocial behaviors, we’d like to see, that’s the time where we really have to step in and go, man, I love how you’re playing with each other and you share so nicely. And then you give specific examples of what they did and high five and make a big deal of it. And so that what you’re doing then is reinforcing the positive behaviors, which brings about closeness rather than reinforcing the conflict. And we all do that inadvertently. I mean, I start the book by talking about how I did exactly that and my kids started to fight over blocks when they were really young. This is from few years back, and all I did was yell down the stairs like, Hey, be nice to your sister. And then I thought, oh my god, what did I just do?
Dr. Sarah (13:36):
It’s so funny that you’re saying this. I really resonate with this because I often kind of in any situation in parenting where something is happening in the moment that is not what we want to see, like a tantrum or a aggressive behavior or fighting, we tend to be very reactive to that. Obviously it’s very loud, it’s very in our face, it’s very hard not to respond to that. But when we’ve noticed a pattern, I always tell parents we need to make a plan to intervene not just in the heat of the moment, but we also need to plan for thinking about the after and before the next time, before the next time is actually I think the most underrated time to be parenting. A lot of times I think initial gut is to focus on during that rarely works because everyone’s too hot to learn anything useful.
(14:33):
That’s kind of just damage control time after gets a lot more tension I think, which is good. I think a lot of parents are learning like, Hey, once your kids are done fighting, then we can debrief things and figure out what didn’t work or we can problem solve and that’s great. But in the that’s wide open magical space for noticing positive interactions with our kids or engaging with them while things aren’t hot and just noticing and pointing out or helping them reflect on things that are going well, that’s when the learning is most accessible to them because they’re not in a fight or flight mode, they’re not in threat mode. They can learn their brains are totally sponges in that time. And when we make it feel good and we point out things they’re doing really well, that builds their confidence. It feels motivating and rewarding to them. I just think it’s an underrated space in teaching our kids about healthy relationship skills.
Dr. Jonathan (15:39):
You really put your finger on it. In fact, you probably could have written my book because that is literally a very big part of what I write about is so many parents, including myself, and I’ve been at this for a long time, end up just winging a lot of interventions. Their kids are yelling and we’re like, you don’t know what to do. So you go to your room and you go to your room or be nice to each other. Or, you’re bigger, you should know better. And we kind of just throw these things at our kids and none of those are effective. In fact, all of those things make it worse and we don’t realize that we’re making it worse. And I can explain how we do, but we are that kind of winging it behavior. It doesn’t teach anything either. And so when you bring up the before, what we’re talking about is really being planful and parents having strategies, not just kids, we could teach our kids strategies, but parents having strategies for not only dealing with conflict when it emerges, but also how to build closeness and closeness is incredibly important for sibling relationships. If you take a look at the research, there’s so many developmental benefits to closeness and some are really surprising, but sibling closeness is associated with better peer relationships, better academic performance, better self-esteem, less mental health challenges in adulthood.
(17:12):
It’s related to happier marriages and other romantic relationships and having more friendships. Believe it or not, it’s linked to better health and even longevity because close relationships with siblings in old age promotes longevity as well. And so it’s really great to have our siblings be close and not to spend too much more time on it, but there are other research that when kids grow up in difficult circumstances, having a good relationship to a sibling, it can buffer the negative effects of those harsh environments. So for example, in families of divorce, kids often struggled behaviorally and such for about a year or so, and then they tend to catch up, but if they have a good relationship with a sibling, you don’t see that. And so helping your siblings be close is critically important. And so having a plan, as you said, thinking about the before is the way to do that.
(18:12):
And so one of the things that you can do is just as you said, sort of sit down with your family and have a meeting when things are calm and just say, what are the rules of engagement? So what two are going to go into a room and play with each other and what’s the expectation and give them behaviors that they’re supposed to use. And if somebody doesn’t share, what do you do? And then when you see it, you praise it. You also give them a choice, which is if they mess up, you can say no, you can’t grab things out of your brother’s sister’s hands, remember the rules. And then you have them sort of share their memory of the rules and you go over it again. And then you say, now you have a choice. You can either ask politely or you can continue to grab out of your brother’s sister’s hand, and if you do, there’s this consequence, and if you do it the way we talked about, then you get this kind of reward and you have this plan in place so you’re not winging it so that when it happens, you can go back and say, Hey, remember what we talked about and then let’s try it out Now we can even make a game of it when they’re little.
(19:27):
Let’s try it out. And then you give them the opportunity to try it out and then you reward it and then you have them. You can also teach them to reward each other and to praise each other and compliment each other, and thank you for asking me and not grabbing so that it’s this kind of reciprocal engagement and that’s what builds closeness. Because on the other hand, just to go back to what I was saying about how the things we say make it worse, if you say you two go to your rooms, it don’t play with each other anymore. You’re not allowed to be together. You’re actually building more sibling distance. It’s not teaching any closeness or conflict resolution, it’s just teaching stay away from each other. And it might be nicer for us because there’s not as much fighting, but the flip side of it is there’s also not as much closeness.
Dr. Sarah (20:21):
Which I think is, and I think again, it highlights the fact that this is a bit of a, you have to put a little bit more thought and effort. It’s a longer game strategy for sure, because in the heat of the moment, if it’s all devolving, we are going to need to separate them sometimes, but it’s about reducing those moments from happening in the first place. And that might just mean because also I’m thinking of a lot of kids where you can give them all the rules, you can go over all the strategies and they’re in the moment, the impulsivity, the inhibition of impulse, the heat just comes in those cases. I always, like you were saying too, it feels so necessary for us to sometimes have our kids go off and play together.
(21:11):
And if you have kids who struggle with it and you want to help them get better, they need a buddy guard to help prevent it getting too hot, too bad, too out of control, that now we’re only dealing with repair. We need some preventative support from a parent. And so it’s hard. We do want to be able to just do the dishes and have our kids occupy themselves, but if they really are struggling with a lot of fighting and a lot of conflict as you’re building up this longer set of skills, I think sometimes they need more supervision than we would like to admit that they need.
Dr. Jonathan (21:52):
Totally. And the notion that they get really hot and quickly and maybe impulsive and don’t have a lot of emotional regulation, particularly at younger ages because that’s kind of something we have to learn is emotional regulation is that’s why I like to introduce this idea of try again. And the try again doesn’t have to be right then in that moment it might be like, let’s go sit over here and read a book and calm down and then come back to it. But it does require some parental involvement. But I just want to kind of give a caveat to that and be careful of what kind of parent involvement we’re talking about. Because believe it or not, the research on sibling relationships is the more involved parents are, the worse the sibling relationships are.
(22:47):
I don’t think it’s because of parent involvement. I think it’s the way parents get involved. Those things I just said just described, be nice to your sister, you’re older, you should know better or why can’t you two just get along those kind of things, actually separate siblings and don’t allow for the building of closeness. So if you think about it this way, saying be nice to your sister is side taking, right? You’re taking the sister side, the daughter’s side, and if you’re saying you’re older, you should know better. You’re taking the younger one’s side. And once you get involved with side taking, then you build resentment in the outsider in the child that you’re not taking the side with and that resentment has to go somewhere.
(23:37):
And so now you see this thing, this idea of favoritism start to crop up, which is why do you take their side? Kids don’t say it like that, but that’s kind of the question. And then the parent’s answer is because you’re older and that’s not really fair either, right? Because older children, they want to feel like they’re on the inside. And so if you set the rules of engagement ahead of time and you can say, I want to see both of you share and I want to see both of you compliment each other, then it’s just about the rules. It’s not about I’m coming in to protect one child from the other. And we tend to do this reflexively and even in research, parents tend to come in and protect the little one against the older ones.
(24:26):
You’re bigger, you should know better. Why don’t you just share your toy, be a good brother, be a good sister, those kinds of things. And some kids respond really well to that, but there’s a whole host of kids who are like, it’s not fair. And then of course that just reinforces the outsider status because parents go, yes, it’s fair. What are you talking about? I treat you kids the same. I love you the same. And it doesn’t match the reality of what just happened, which is you said, be nice to my sister. You didn’t tell my sister to be nice to me.
Dr. Sarah (25:00):
And even this idea of being nice, I feel like kind of misses the mark, right? Because when you tell a kid, and I’m guilty of this too, a hundred percent, but when you tell a kid to be nice or stop being mean, we’re taking it one step removed from the sort of facts of the actual thing. That’s an interpretation. You said this or you did this or you took this. That is more objective. And I think if we can stick to the facts, we can help our kids make better connections, connect the dots more effectively because they’re not saying to themselves, oh, she took my toy so I’m going to grab it back to her because I want to be mean. They’re saying she took my toy that made me really mad. I’m going to grab it back because it’s mine. They’re not trying to be mean.
(25:50):
They’re trying to, I don’t know, achieve some end that matters to them or express an explosive emotion that’s out of their control consciously. And so when we can focus on like, oh, you grabbed that out of her hand roughly, is there a different way you could say, can I have that back? I was using it. We’re taking the judgment out of it, which is hard because we’re probably flooded too when this is happening. So parental regulation is got to be primary, but if we could stay calm and then we can help them kind of like you were saying, sometimes I’ll describe it is like refereeing versus sports casting. A referee is trying to say who’s right, who’s wrong, who’s winning, who’s losing. Whereas a sportscaster is just kind of describing what is happening, narrating the shoe, and then in helping them become more aware of what is going on, you can also give them some tools to, what are your thoughts on that distinction? I agree that parental involvement can be unhelpful, but I also think there are ways for it to be for it to helpful and sometimes even critical if your kids have a tendency to get hot, fast and move into that aggressive place, and then damage is, harm is caused, we need to prevent the harm too so that that relationship can be preserved also.
Dr. Jonathan (27:17):
Yeah, it’s very insightful and I think accurate what you’re describing. I like the analogy to the sportscaster, narrating and the referee. I’m going to add one other piece to your analogy, which is that we also have to be really good coaches and effective coaches sort of help their players play better. Bad coaches are like, you’re playing the game terrible. I’m benching you. But good coaches are like, this is how you play the game better. And so I like you first you can describe what has just happened and then you can engage in some coaching. Most kids after, if they’re left alone or pretty good at resolving things by themselves, especially young kids, we hold onto it, but 10 seconds later they’re like best friends again after they said that they hated them more than anything. So we can create more drama than actually the kids do, which I think is part of why we have to pay attention. And you’ve mentioned parent regulation that that’s a huge part. We have to stay calm and we have to give ourselves opportunities to enter into ways in which we can be helpful. A general rule that I tend to talk about in the courses that I teach or that I’ve written about and are in this book too, is that you don’t want any harm to happen. And so no hitting, no kicking, no pinching, and also no name calling, no intent to harm.
(28:56):
And that the parents can have a no violence rule in the house in which none of that is tolerated. But you can’t just say you can’t do these things. They have to have substitute positive behaviors that they can do instead. But the other piece of research, which I didn’t mention up top because it’s kind of dark, is that what got me into studying siblings is that the number one form of child maltreatment and family violence is sibling violence, and it outnumbers parental violence of kids pure violence and domestic violence or partner battering combined. That’s how prevalent it is.
(29:36):
A lot of it is because we believe that it’s okay for siblings to hit each other sometimes or to name call or to shove each other or do those kinds of things, but it’s just interpersonal violence under a different category. And so it’s really important, very, very young to start with this rule. And if you’re listening and your kids are hitting each other and they’re a little bit older, it’s a great time to stop and have that conversation with them and come up with different strategies because it’s so prevalent and it’s so normalized, but it’s not hopeless. You can certainly intervene. Even siblings and adulthood can change. And so one of the things that happens for a lot of parents that you’ve observed is that you bring a newborn home and then the firstborn is kind of mad because they were the center of the universe and all of a sudden there’s this other creature that’s taking a lot of attention and now they’re being asked to wait, okay, I’ll play with you after I feed your brother.
(30:44):
And they have to learn this sort of patience and tolerating being frustrated and so on. And so they sometimes act aggressively towards the infant. I’ve heard lots of stories about kids who will go up and smack the baby or throw something at them. And this is a really important moment for parents because if you say what’s wrong with you, you don’t hit people, get out of here. All you’ve done is created more outsider status. They’ve already feel like I’m on the outside and there’s a new person that’s taken my position, so to speak. And instead if you say, no, hitting’s not allowed, but here, come on in, help me feed your new brother. This is how you hold a bottle. Get me the blanket here. I need some diapers. I have to do a change. And you kind of bring them in as an insider. Then they’re not resentful and aggressive because they see that they’re in on this new person and they’re part of the process. And so it’s those kind of things. It’s not parental involvement, it’s how we involve. And so if we do it in these kind of ways, and of course again you said parental regulation, it’s hard when you see one kid hit a baby not to keep it together. Want to be able to…
Dr. Sarah (32:06):
Yeah, especially if you’re like postpartum. You have your postpartum mama bear rage is going to just flood you and you don’t have that kind of, I remember actually it happens also, I think I see, tell me if you see this too, but I see with new babies, new siblings, there can be a lot aggression towards the baby. I think a lot of times there’s more just dysregulation because they don’t actually want to direct it at a baby. They kind of understand that’s not really the right outlet, but they have all this resentment or anger or frustration or just feelings that are overwhelming to them. And so they either direct it at the parent or it comes out in weird places like sleep aggressions or other behavioral kind of dysregulation. But where I really see a lot more directed sibling aggression is when the new sibling is crawling or starting to be more of a contender in the home and has more agency to knock down your tower that you were building or get in your way or do things that then I start to see more aggression targeted at the baby or at the younger sibling.
(33:22):
And so I feel like what you’re saying is from the very beginning, being really mindful of this insider versus outsider status, there’s a whole social psychology piece to this. Can you talk a little bit about this ingroup outgroup kind of dynamic that can unintentionally be created by parents when you have this?
Dr. Jonathan (33:48):
Sure. Yeah. And again, I think your observations are right that as kids get older, they tend to feel more challenged that even little kids on some level know you don’t go around hitting babies. But I have to say from my experience, I think it’s different for girls and boys. Girls are often given dolls and they have this idea of like, oh, there’s a new doll in the house, it’s something. And boys don’t necessarily have that same reaction. And so I think you see sometimes more aggression in boys earlier on than girls, but I don’t have any research to back that up. That’s totally just an observation. But I think that you’re correct. As they get older, especially if they’re close in age, they tend to get into each other’s business more. They tend to play with the same toys or be in the same room, or when you have wide age spacing, they tend to not occupy so much.
Dr. Sarah (34:45):
And I think the older one at that point is usually better able to tolerate something they’re doing, being interrupted or being kind of messed up. A lot of this is just from my own experience. My kids are 19 months apart and I know that when my son was two, maybe two and a half and my daughter started to really get into his way, there was so much more aggression. And I do remember, this is why I thought of this. We were talking about parental regulation. It’s so hard as a postpartum mom. I remember one time my son did something to my daughter and literally I went full mama bear. I didn’t even think it was completely reflexive, but I grabbed him and threw him across the playroom because had attacked, but he totally hit my daughter and I just flung him and that scared me. I was very scared of my own response. I really didn’t like because both of their mothers, I don’t want to hurt my kids. And he was fortunately fine. It was a soft landing, but I was just like, it scared me and it made me very aware of the fact that I have to be able to stay calmer in the face of my children’s aggression with each other. I still need to keep them both safe, but I can’t also become part of the problem.
Dr. Jonathan (36:21):
And that insider outsider status you talked about is so important. So you have emotional regulation and then you have, there’s a lot of vying for positions in families with kids. The story of one kid draws a picture and is like, Hey mom, look at what I drew. The other child right away is going to come and be like, look what I drew. And parents are in this sort of position where they’re always being asked to compare and to pay so-called equal attention, which is impossible. There’s no way to do that because different kids require different things, and so we always have to invest differently in our kids. If one kid’s good in math, we don’t need to spend extra time helping them with math problems. If one kid’s good at sports, we spend time at their sports games. And so if one kid is more challenging and requires more coaching, that’s just the way it is. But from the kid’s perspective, there’s never fairness. And if you’ve ever tried to cut a cake in half at a birthday to give each one the same size slice, it’s a lose lose situation. Somebody’s going to complain. And so treating kids exactly the same, it’s a fool’s game because there’s no way to do it, number one. And number two, that shouldn’t be the objective of parenting.
(37:51):
We do our best to give each child what they really need. And when kids get positioned as outsiders or feel like they’re outsiders, they tend to, as you say, get either emotionally dysregulated because that’s a great attention seeking strategy. And by the way, it does sometimes happen with very wide age spacing. I had a family once I was working with where they had a newborn and the 14-year-old, that was 14 years between them starting to become a real challenge when the baby arrived. And so you can see that many, many ages. A lot of it depends on the nature of other relationships too, which I’ll touch briefly on, but when a child says it’s not fair and you treat my brother or sister better, our reactions tend to be dismissed that and say, no, that’s not true. I treat you fairly and I love you the same.
(38:50):
But that’s not what the child is saying. And so if you take it seriously and say, I want to learn more about what you’re seeing and let’s talk about it and what does it feel like and take it, that in and of itself brings the child inside. So I write about this that the way kids typically identify lack of fairness or feeling like there may be parents or have a favorite is to whine and it makes ’em annoying. And then we’re like, Ugh, now I got to deal with this and it only reinforces more of this. Your brother or sister’s easier than you are. You’re the outsider kind of thing.
Dr. Sarah (39:32):
So how do we soften when we hear that wine so grating?
Dr. Jonathan (39:38):
It is I a hundred percent agree and I’m not immune to it. Sometimes my kids will be getting into an argument at the dinner table and I’ll say, I just want to remind you that I’ve written books on this subject.
Dr. Sarah (39:54):
You are my case study children. I am going to take some notes.
Dr. Jonathan (39:57):
No, I’m just saying, you’re making me look like a failure, right?
Dr. Sarah (40:01):
Oh my God. I couldn’t relate so much to that because one time I have podcast on parenting, and one time I was at my kid’s swim class and this woman was like, oh, hey, are you Dr. Sarah Bread from the podcast? I love your podcast. And I was like, oh, that’s amazing. I was so happy. And then I had this thought in the back of my head being like, oh no. Now I have to, can’t yell at my kids in the locker room. I was just like, oh, I got to be a good parent everywhere, or at least here now. I was like, yeah, not really. I can talk about it and I’m a human who has good and bad moments. My kids have been in bad moments.
Dr. Jonathan (40:43):
There have been plenty of times when I was writing the book where I said, my book should be one page long. I’m a fraud because it’s tough. You don’t have complete control over your kids. They’re going to do it. They’re going to do sometimes, and then we then have to choose to behave in the best way that we can in the moment, but we are human. Just like you said. It’s really, really hard to be a parent and it’s really hard. And I just want to touch on this because this is super important too, and you were talking about how we’re all connected in family systems and how our relationships with our partners matter a lot in families. So one of the things that is very helpful is to have a shared parenting approach. If one parent believes, for example, hitting should not be permitted, and the other parent’s like, well, I hit my brother all the time, that now the split, this parenting split gives room for the kids to pretty much do whatever they want because there’s a hierarchy breakdown in the family.
(41:57):
And so parents, not kind of parents have to be on the same team, which you were talking about the before section of you have before the fight and then after the fight or before the closeness and after the closeness. Any of those things can be talked about. That has to be done with partners too because you have to be on the same team and if there’s conflict with partners, it creates more stress in the home and more stress typically results in siblings fighting more. Sometimes, and this is just an aside to this bigger conversation, but sometimes when I’ve been called up about sibling conflict, it’s really about marital conflict. And so I just want to make sure that that’s on people’s radars because you can spend a lot of time using parenting strategies when that’s not really the source of the issue in the family system.
Dr. Sarah (42:56):
I mean, that’s why whenever I work with families, I mean when I work with a kid or work with families as a whole, the entire family is definitely a part of it, a part of the treatment. I never work with kids without working with the parents too, because we just can’t separate out the things that you’re seeing a child show up, especially younger kids, but even older kids to some degree. We need to look at the whole picture because there’s so much bi-directional and multi-directional engagement happening. And a lot of it, it’s not always on the surface, especially with things like aggression and regulation issues. A lot of that is low level chronic nervous system activation, stress felt, stress that’s shared and felt tension that’s shared, and then it just gets inside our bodies and it has to come out somewhere. We hadn’t talked about this, but I’m interested in your, I’m about from an attachment lens.
(44:01):
I always say kids save their absolute worst for their parents because we’re their safest people to dump all that stuff on, and that actually is a sign that they do feel really safe with us. But that parent child dynamic is a one way thing. We’re not dumping on our kids because we’re safe with them. When you have two siblings who do feel really safe with one another and really have a very intimate relationship with one another, they can be super disinhibited with each other because they can, they feel really safe to just completely unleash on one another. And they kind of know, and I think this is a good thing on some level that they know that we will always be there for each other. So you’re not going anywhere. I trust this relationship so I can just unload on you. But because they’re two kids, there isn’t that adult side to that dynamic where one adult, the kids can unload on us, but we’re not going to unload on them. But two siblings will totally just unload on each other and not just physically, but emotionally too. And I think one that’s a sign that there’s probably some secure attachment in that relationship, but also it can be really destructive. And so they need a little bit of parental help there too. I’m just curious what your thoughts are on that attachment piece.
Dr. Jonathan (45:16):
You’re probably going to find my thoughts amusing on this subject because first of all, before I get to the amusing part, this is really fascinating, is that if you look at research on sibling relationships, the closer siblings are, the more they fight. And it’s exactly for the reasons that you just laid out. Plus, they tend to spend a lot of time with each other. And the more time you spend with somebody, the more likely you’re going to bump into some things you’re going to disagree about.
(45:47):
And then of course, as you said, if you’re close, you have lots of secrets about the other person and that sometimes those secrets get out. There’s lots of, or the feeling, I can borrow your sweater because those kinds of things. So more disengaged siblings, more distant siblings don’t fight so much, but there’s so many disadvantages to not having a close relationship that you want them to be close. So you’re going to get fighting. There’s no way to prevent it or avoid it in the big picture. It’s just like spouses or roommates or anybody else you’re spending time with, you’re going to bump into things. So that’s really important. I have observed that one of the things that parents really should focus on or think about is when fighting happens, because for a lot of families, when you start to, you can even keep a chart, it tends to be around transitions when kids just get home from school or it’s bedtime or when people go on vacation is the worst because everything is just up for grabs. None of the rules apply anymore. And they’re like, we’re not on vacation, and you kids have not been. You get to that kind of thing. So if you track that, you can be planful for what’s about to happen, but you also start to realize that, and this is the amusing part, it’s so much of the fighting, it just has to do with them being hungry.
(47:12):
Or just that they got off the bus and they’re exhausted and they’ve had to deal with people all day long and they just want to come home and either chill out and now somebody’s annoying them or they need a place to dump all the aggravation of the day. And siblings are such an easy target, especially if they’re close to each other, and if it’s antagonistic already, that even creates the environment where, okay, now I have a reason. You’ve given me legitimate reason to take this out on you in their own heads. And so I’ve done so many presentations to therapists. I tell my own students, I’ve podcasts, just make sure your kids are well fed and that they’re getting good sleep, and that will take care of a lot of the issues. You can spend a lot of time, again, trying to come up with fancy interventions, but if your kids are hungry, I mean, I don’t know what it’s like when you’re hungry, but I’m never at my best when I’m hungry. And so when those kids get off the bus or they start to get sort of antagonistic, maybe it’s time to have a snack or have some food and then let’s talk about what just happened.
Dr. Sarah (48:25):
No, I think that’s true. The baseline, we forget how important these baseline pieces are, but we’re talking about regulation. Sibling rivalry is very deeply connected to regulation, and if you’re having issues with regulation on a chronic basis, start with the basics, right? Sleep enough, hydration, enough movement, enough nutrition, some fresh air and sunshine, some connection. Those are those core basics. And if you make sure that those are dressed and there’s still a lot of conflict, then we dial in some strategies. But start there.
Dr. Jonathan (49:06):
A hundred percent. We have a rule in my family, which is that we don’t get into conversations unless you’ve had food. Because this is, I tell my class this story because it was so educational for me as somebody who’s been in the field for 30 years had just put a light bulb in my head. I would pick up my daughter from middle school, and now she’s a freshman in high school, but when she was in middle school, I’d pick her up from school and she would get in the car and she would just start ranting about, this girl said this and this kid did this and this did this. And I was like, oh my God, I’m stuck in the car with this.
(49:44):
So as a parent, of course, I’m like saying things like, I don’t know why you’re friends with that kid anyway, you complain about them every single day, and why don’t you just let that go? Or maybe you should go talk to your teacher and just coming up with these solutions and it would just fire her up even more. And then one day she says to me, dad, just let me vent. I just need to get this out. And why can’t you ever just say like, man, that was a hard day. And I go, okay. So the next time I drove her home, she vented the whole way home, which is great, but I did it. And then we got in the driveway and I go, man, that sounds like it was a really hard day. And she goes, thank you. Then she went in the house and she was so much nicer to everybody else, including her siblings. I didn’t fire up.
Dr. Sarah (50:42):
She needed to discharge all that stuff.
Dr. Jonathan (50:43):
I didn’t fire her up on the way home either, add to it, and then she’s hungry and her siblings are watching the TV when she wants to sit and watch the tv, that kind of thing.
Dr. Sarah (50:54):
No, I think that this is really powerful and I think there’s a lot of really important takeaways here. I think for me, something that you said it, and I don’t want to highlight it, I think it is really important. And that is even just the people sending questions a lot, being like, my kids fight. How do I get them to stop fighting? And we focus on the things that aren’t working. But I think your point to instead of focusing exclusively on the things that are problematic in your kid’s relationship, to really focus on building closeness and building a sense of love and noticing, really noticing closeness and noticing their love for each other and helping them log that and let them know that you’re paying attention to that, it’s already happening. So you just need to look for it and help them see it too, and help that be the narrative. And that’s probably the lowest hanging fruit available because it’s already happening. You just have to, what you put your attention on is going to get internalized by these kids. So if you put your attention on the fighting, they will internalize, we fight. If you put your attention on the closeness and the kindness and the moments of tenderness, they’re going to internalize like, wow, I love my sibling. They love me. That’s the story that they tell themselves and that’s how they show up.
Dr. Jonathan (52:21):
Yep. I think that you nailed it.
Dr. Sarah (52:25):
Thank you so much. If people want to follow you, read your books, how can they get in touch with you or get a copy of your book?
Dr. Jonathan (52:35):
The book you could get anywhere, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, all those places, and it’s out on Guilford Press, and you can go right to their website. You can also, I have a website, which I need to be better at updating, but it’s sibling expert.com and on Instagram, it’s sibling expert. And so those are probably the best ways to find me.
Dr. Sarah (53:03):
Amazing. We’ll link all that too, so everyone can just go right to the show description, the show notes, and go follow, follow you. And this is so, this is such important stuff to be talking about. I think it doesn’t get enough attention and it’s so critical for the health of the family system. So thank you.
Dr. Jonathan (53:21):
Oh, thanks for having me, and your questions and insights were really good and helpful for me in thinking this through to even next steps.
Dr. Sarah (53:34):
Amazing. Another book.
Dr. Jonathan (53:35):
There we go.
Dr. Sarah (53:37):
Yes. Thank you so much.
Dr. Jonathan (53:38):
You can write the next one.
Dr. Sarah (53:48):
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