How To Tackle Sibling Rivalry!

How to tackle it coolly.

- Unmana Dutta

Parents are usually saying to their kids, “It’s just you two, and yet you have so much of a fight. We used to be in a joint family and we used to have each other’s back all the time.” The concept of ‘sibling rivalry’ has been used for a long time now and it is a common phenomenon in most families. This happens because the siblings are jealous of each other, and they take out the anger by showing it to their parents or later hitting their sibling mostly in front of their parents. Usually, children with more than two years of gap between their births have more problems of feeling challenged by someone who now has got more close to his or her parent.

Children are always striving to attain their own identities. By the presence of another child, they feel that they have lost their identity of being the most loved child of their parent. They feel that they are getting less attention, care and love, compared to the previous times. They may sometimes pick a fight with the other sibling because this helps them to get the correct amount of attention that they want to get like the earlier times, before the arrival of the sibling into the family. More care and preference of one child over another, often leads the child to be jealous and pick up more aggression, where often an explanation like “fighting between children is normal” is given. Moreover, too much of stress in the lives of the parents often leads them to ignore their children, leading them to quarrel with each other.

Handling siblings by parents, without taking any sides is an art in itself. Many parents feel that they are unbiased to their kids, but it is generally not possible to be unbiased at all times. If the mother hugs a child, it is not possible to hug all her children for the exact amount of time. So, the following dos and don’ts are important to handle sibling rivalry:

Don’t take sides