How to stop your kids from fighting - parent-of-three Greg Bruce asks

Pulling your hair out over sibling rivalry? You're not alone.

When Clara was born, we were so excited for her to meet her big sister. We wanted nothing more in the world at that time than for Tallulah to fall in love with her, as we already had, and to become her best friend and number one fan and, to not put too fine a point on it, spend quite a bit of time playing with her. The photo of their first meeting, at Birthcare, long ago entered family folklore. Tallulah, then not quite 2, sits with hours-old Clara on her lap, looking at the camera with an expression of purest contempt. I took that photo and once it was done I couldn’t get Clara away from her sister fast enough.

For what felt like months, Tallulah would only refer to Clara as “New Baby”. If we thought this broken social dynamic would be a passing phase, we were wrong. When Casper was born 18 months later, I wasn’t worried about how he’d be received by his siblings. I knew they would hate him.

I would look at other families and see the kids spontaneously hugging each other and would hear stories about older kids who doted on their younger siblings and I wondered what we were doing wrong.

Now they are 9, 7 and 6, our kids’ relationships strike me as relatively normal, by which I mean they can sometimes play together for minutes without bullying or antagonising each other or engaging in physical violence. And now I’m more experienced at parenting, I know that the kids who appeared to love their siblings were either secretly hurting them or the parents who sold me a bill of goods about harmonious sibling relations were just trying to make themselves feel better.

That is to say, sibling rivalry is normal - which is not to say that it is fun, nor that there aren’t things you can do to make it better, as Jackie Riach, psychologist and manager of parenting organisation Triple P NZ, told me this week.

My kids play together reasonably well these days but when things break down, as they do often, they can do so catastrophically, at which point I am required to find a wise and fair solution, which never seems to exist because the chain of causality in the conflict is apparently never-ending: someone did something because someone else did something because someone else did something and so on, until the only remaining source of blame is presumably me, for providing their genetic inheritance.

Riach says sibling rivalry can sometimes be about a child’s feeling of a lack of parental attention. This doesn’t mean the solution is taking all your kids on one-on-one dates you don’t have time for. Get creative about it. Riach suggests you might be able to incorporate it into something you’re already doing. Say you’re baking cupcakes, you might tell one of your children you need their help.

Another positive step, she says, is to make sure you’re not comparing your kids to one another: “Why can’t you be more like your brother? Your sister can do it. Why can’t you? Your brother’s only 3 and he can do it – those kinds of comparisons that we sometimes fall into the trap of making.” Instead, she says, it’s important to allow kids to be themselves, noticing and encouraging their individual strengths.

You should praise and encourage teamwork, turn-taking, sharing and problem-solving. Your praise should involve specifics, Riach says: “Not just, ‘Good on you guys’ but, ‘Wow I really like how you offered your brother a couple of choices there. That was excellent.’” You can incorporate team decisions into your everyday lives by doing things like collectively deciding on a family movie.

Ultimately, then, the best way for me to avoid that horrible feeling of trying to solve the unsolvable is to be proactive, to make sure my kids are getting adequate parental attention, to spend more time teaching them how to resolve their issues before they happen. It doesn’t mean my kids won’t fight but it does mean I might not be required so often to come in waving my arms and coming up with inadequate solutions that make everyone hate me.