not sure if this belongs here - re sibling conflicts

[Robinna]

We are very "bought in" to the Coloroso et al philosophies about communicating with children and teaching personal discipline. But our children are very young (2 1/2 and 5) and sometimes it just seems unrealistic to expect them to work through some of this stuff. right now I'm trying to deal with them fighting. I want them to be able to resolve their own conflicts, but they seem unable to get past "mine" and "now". Most of their conflicts boil down to who gets to play with what, and when. I'm wondering how all of you handle a few different things...

ownership of toys - who owns what? are they obliged to share? What if the toy used to belong to the older sib but now is used by the younger sib? what if one sib is playing with the other's toy - how much does the actual ownership of the toy matter if they're fighting over it?

playing together, or not - what if older sib is playing with, say, a set of trains and tracks. some of the trains belong to each sib, and some of the tracks belong to each sib. Sib #1 has taken a HUGE amount of time and made a VERY elaborate arrangement of tracks, and has gone off to do something else but will (you KNOW they will and you wouldn't choose to clean it up on them because you'd feel mean doing so) come back and play with the tracks again later, and s/he doesn't want Sib#2 to touch any of it. Sib#2 is desparate to get into the trains right now. whaddaya do?

OR - sib#1 is actively playing with all those tracks & trains, and sib#2 wants to play too, but sib#1 emphatically does NOT want company? remembering that some of the tracks & trains belong to each, and I don't actually remember what belongs to who, but they both have the same "favorites" (of course)

When they're fighting, under what circumstances do you intervene? If one of the sibs is lacking language skills to actually discuss a problem, how do you facilitate without showing favoritism?

All this conflict over belongings makes me freakin' crazy because we are NOT a materialistic household and the whole arguement just makes me ill because it's so PETTY. I know it's important to THEM, but how do you teach them that the PERSON they are looking at is so much more important than the THING they are holding? How old do they have to be before they start prioritizing in a way that includes the feelings of others?

I'm just so upset by the situation. I wish I wasn't emotionally invested in how well they get along.

[Fuamami]

I can totally relate! We also strive to be non-materialistic, and it can get so frustrating when they're fighting over some little piece of crap toy that was a favor at a birthday party.

My philosophy, however, is that we do need to honor property rights, whether or not we agree that the property holds value. And I also try to think of my kids having a kind of Mazlow pyramid of needs. So, if they feel that their stuff and their desire to have it will be protected, they will then be freed to realize that stuff isn't the most important thing in the world. I have actually seen this work very effectively in my home. My children are required to share, unless they receive something very special or specifically for them (small parts/breakable/designed for babies, etc.) Then they will not have to share them. But otherwise, it's pretty much fair game. One thing that I've found to be very effective in the "mine" wars is to agree that, yes, it is their's. So here's how that plays out:

Dd has a rubber shark that ds1 gave her. It's cool, but it's not super special and it's appropriate for all the kids to play with. Dd has had it for a few months and is not particularly attached to it. Ds1 picks it up and starts playing with it. Dd is feeling grouchy and possessive and yells, "That's mine!" I respond with, "Yes, that is yours." Then I turn directly to ds1 and say, "Ds1, that shark belongs to dd. She's letting you have a turn with it right now."

Almost every time, that placates everyone.

As far as your train example, I would try to have a rule that if you leave something set up in a public area (which is our basement and living room), it is going to be fair game if it is left unattended. Maybe you could offer to help rebuild it if it got messed up?

I also do a lot of facilitating in ways that will come across as very neutral. I try to reflect their feelings or verbalize them if they're too young, and offer a few simple suggestions to playing together. If things are going really bad, and I have the energy, I'll get really involved and play too and try to make it super fun for everyone. Then I hope they learn by modeling. If things are going really bad and I have no energy, I might just decide we should go for a walk, or ask one kid to help me with something fun, or even turn on a movie for them.

[Just1More]

I, too, believe in property rights. My kids are young, too...3 and 1...but even the 1 year old understands the idea enough and will give it back/not touch it because it's his sisters. I do a lot of...that's dd's, but THIS is yours, and give him his. I agree that when they are confident that something truly belongs to them, then they are free to do with it what they will...including kind sharing. Otherwise, it's communism, under the guise of democracy. They can see through the ruse and they KNOW it's not REALLY theirs. If we have squabbles, the object goes back to the owner, period.

But, most of our toys belong to ME. So, if there are squabbles, they go back to the owner...me. See, they are mine, and I'm sharing, but if we can't play nice, then I don't have to share. I think that's modeling my OWN rights...and teaching them how to stand up for themselves down the line. If your friend is hurting you, your feelings, or your stuff, you have the RIGHT to walk away...and take your cool stuff with you.

I've heard of families having success with making a big pile of all their toys and letting the kids choose things out, one at a time. Then you label each and every toy with the child's name. Again, if there's a squabble, it goes back to the owner. Soon TRUE and UNFORCED sharing (and bargaining and trading) start happening. I think it is a lovely and educational process, actually.

Oh, and here, when you are done with something (ie. the train set). You put it away, or verbally hand over rights to another. (DD are you done? Are you sure? Okay...so ds can play with it now? Okay. DS, DD says she's done, do you want to play with it?) And I don't allow going back on that. I also allow my kids to play alone if they want to. I don't force playtime together.

In fact, I more often enforce their right to play alone, more so for ds because he doesn't talk much yet.

Oh, and my dd (who's 3.5) gets it that ds is younger and is "raccoonish"...as in bright and shiny is very appealing to him. She's learned to let him take a turn with most things just for the joy of helping him learn about our world, and to make him happy. I've really enlisted her to help me teach him things, and she takes it seriously. I hear her grilling him on the alphabet and such all the time. Or "see buddy, this goes round and round. do you see it go round and round? can you say round and round?"

I intervene when it sounds ugly. If they aren't resolving it nicely, then I intervene. I don't nasty yelling screaming "MINE!" habits to be forming. I'm pretty laid back about it, though. "hey, dd...he's crying. when cries that means 'no'. give it back, k?" and she does. Or "no, no ds...that's dd's. give it to dd. thanks buddy." if he's having a hard time, I help him follow through and distract him, either before or afterwards, whatever it takes. I say it in about the same tone I say "okay, supper's ready, come to the table please." Or however I'd relay any other casual piece of information.

As far as the little kid toys that get passed down...when dd grew out of them, I absorb them into MY pile. DS owns his cars and trucks, and a few other things, and she has her basket of stuff but most of the toys really are "mine". She doesn't remember the things she was given as a baby, and unless it was really a special gift, when she's bored with it and has forgotten it, I put it away for a while and then bring it out in my stash.

We're very non-materialistic, too, and I often remind dd that stuff is never more important that people. It's not worth fighting, lying, etc, about. In fact, God has blessed us SO much and made it easy for us not to worry about stuff. We can easily just go buy a new one if something happened to it.

If dd is doing something special, I let her sit in a room near us behind a gate so she has some space from ds. I don't allow him to touch her thing (like a block structure or something) without her permissionor until she's given over her rights to him to play with it. I'm teaching him to ask first. He does pretty well with it. Mostly, though, I just let her sit in the pack n play or something so he can't get to her. I also teach them to ask if they can play, too. And I teach them that it's okay to say, "no thank you...I'd like to be alone for a while." And I help the other one repect that (by giving them something else to do....more often than not, the new activity will draw the one who didn't want to play and then they are both playing together again, or both playing with me.)

[ChetMC]

What We Do

First of all, if you haven't read Siblings Without Rivalry you should take a look at it. There is a lot of stuff in the book about helping kids work out their own problems, limiting adult intervention, and deciding when and how to get involved.

We run a very communist household. Very few items are identified as belonging to a single person. Overall, I think this has resulted in vastly fewer conflicts. However, we've done it from day one. Also, because the kids are the same gender and are close in age it's more difficult to naturally distinguish possessions. I'm not sure how things would go if the kids knew who every single scrap in the house "belonged" to, and we attempted to introduce communal principles after the fact.

I believe that SWR recommends something like just telling the kids all toys belong to all kids except special toys. For special things, each child is given a space to set things they want to be kept separate, and other children have to ask the owner first to access items from that space. When the child's special shelf or whatever gets to be overflowing, a parent just helps the child review the contents and return a certain number of items to the general pool.

Our girls only recognize a handful of toys as belonging exclusively to one child or the other. I do think the fact that it's only a couple of things makes it far easier for them to respect that those few items are "owned." In the case of those special items, it is understood that you can't use it or play with it without the permission of the owner. Each or our girls might have three or four such items.

Our girls are 16 months apart, and for the most part, they play together so we don't get a lot of situations like what you describe with the train tracks. For a 2.5 year old and a 5 year old, I'd probably present the situation to the 5 year and solicit him for solutions. Five is definitely old enough to understand that a two year old is not the same as another five year old or an adult. So I would try something like...

"You're working really hard on that track. If you leave it in middle of the living room floor your sister might take it apart, or change it around, what should we do?" Maybe he decides to only build special things in his room or in the basement. Maybe he decides to accept the risk. Maybe he sets aside a percentage of track for his sibling to use and offers it to her when she starts eying his construction, accepting that she may still take interest in what he is doing if it's in a common space. Maybe he decides to let his sister take it apart and plans to rebuild after she goes to bed or when she has her nap.

For siblings with larger age, skill and interest gaps than what we're working with I've known parents to make sure that the older child has a sibling free place to do things. It can be hard for an older child to constantly have a much younger child working against them. I think it's reasonable when one child has a lot more invested in the situation than the other child to just distract the party who is most easily distracted.

We've tried to curb the use of random, "mine" and underscore the concept that ownership and access are often based on need. We don't need to do nearly as much of it now, but for awhile, if one of the kids said something like, "this is my crayon," or, "this is my shirt," I would respond with something like, "you are using that red crayon because you need to colour the apple red," or, "you are wearing that shirt because it fits you, soon it will fit Penny and you will need a bigger shirt."

For us, adult intervention is mostly necessary to reinforce the basic principles when they aren't being followed :

- never snatch something you want from the person who is using it, ask for the item with a nice voice.
- the person may say no, if they say no, you need to wait until they are finished, even if that's really hard to do.
- when you say no, you need to say it in a nice way.
- special or needed items are always returned to the owner.
- explain the problem and/or say what you need (as opposed to screaming or hitting or whatever, at our house, screaming is the issue).
- when people play together it has to be fun for everyone.
- any fact about dealing with the sibling that has been forgotten, for example, we have a 4 month old baby, so we may need to remind our older kids what babies can and can't play with, what babies do and do not like, etc.

Things from you that will help :

- offer sympathy ("it's frustrating when your sister wants to undo what you've done").
- offer insight into what the other child is feeling ("you make the trains look really fun, she wants to do it to")
- try not to tell the kids what the solution is, ask them for solutions or suggest solutions and ask if it would be acceptable, if it's not acceptable encourage them to suggest why and give a different solution (this is something your five year old will do more than your 2.5 year old, but your younger child will pick it up).

Don't get caught up in things needing to be fair. When our younger DD was a baby and our older DD was 2.5 we'd explain to older DD that it wasn't fun for her to have all the toys and baby to have no toys. Playing together had to fun for everyone. Now, often the solution was that 2.5 year old DD had most toys and baby had a single pathetic, crappy, how-could-that-possibly-be-fun object, but if the baby accepted it, that was fine. If baby didn't accept it, older DD had to try again.

When an item is highly contentious is gets put away. It's brought back out when the kids have a plan. I can't remember the last time I had to put a toy away though.

[lovemyfamily6]

Julie, those are really great suggestions!

My oldest is 20 months older than the twins, and they are almost four years older than the little one. The 16 month old has his toys because they're safe for him. The bigger ones like playing with his stuff and that's okay, but they may not yank it out of his hand. And it must be returned to his bin so it's available for him.

The bigger ones have a play room upstairs. Nearly everything is a community toy. They do all have a few special things though, so we have a bookshelf in their bedroom (they choose to share a room together). Each one of them gets a shelf for their special things. If someone wants to use it, they must ask for permission. That works well for us for the most part.

We do still get the occasional "But I was playing with it first" or other complaint, and I'm going to use Julie's tips to help with that.

[Pam_and_Abigail]

My kids (just-turned-six and 3.5 yrs) are always fighting, often over stuff, and it's driving me nuts. We too, have tried to encourage sharing and most toys belonging to everyone, but it has come to be that anything given to one as a gift, ie for a birthday, becomes "special", so that they are both hung up on being possessive, seemingly just so they can exclude the other. They share a bedroom, and although the older dd has a place she can put things out of reach of her sister, her younger sister doesn't really have a similar place. I've been thinking about a wooden treasure box under each girl's bed, but I'm not certain that would be respected.
I will ckeck out SWR for some ideas, too.

[transformed]

I feel like the first step you need to take is to be ok with conflict and discontent.

Recently, I was stressing out with my (same age) children fighting and I had a revelation.....

Just let them fight. And see what happens.

I decided to stop micromanaging their relationship and just allow them to be siblings.

What happened? I think they are better friends NOW than they were before. As long as no one is getting hurt, I am allowing my kids to fight when they want to. I ask them if they would like me to intervene, and sometimes they do, but for the most part, I think bickering is just part of siblinghood.

For your example, I think the one child has a right to play with the trains and build as elabborate of a set as they choose to - It would be unfair to make the child share.

One thing that works around here is "trading" when one child has something that the other wants, they learn to "trade" something for it.

Or put a time limit on it. "10 more minutes and then its Sally's turn." Or "10 more minutes and then you are both going to play together." or "give Sally a little job - " (Teach the kid to delegate! ) Or "I am going to put these couple of pieces over here for Sally to play with while you build your big track."

I hope this isnt too rambly.

Seriously - let them fight a little. Its their relationship. They may grow up to be great friends. They may grow up to hate eachother. Let them be whatever they are supposed to be without intervention.