180: How to get your children to stop fighting

Kelly Peterson 00:03

Hi, this is Kelly Peterson from Chicago, Illinois. There’s no other resource out there quite like Your Parenting Mojo, which doesn’t just tell you about the latest scientific research on parenting and child development, but puts it into context for you as well so you can decide whether and how to use this new information. If you’d like to get new episodes in your inbox along with a free infographic on 13 Reasons Your Child Isn’t Listening to You and what to do about each one, sign up at YourParentingMojo.com/subscribe. If you’d like to start a conversation with someone about this episode, or you know someone who would find it useful, please do forward it to them. Thank you so much.

Jen Lumanlan 00:55

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  Your kids never fight, right?  I didn’t think so.  Of all the challenges that parents come to me with, sibling fighting is one of the biggest, and it seems like no matter what they’ve tried, it never gets better.  A lot of these parents tell me they’re able to stay calm as their children start poking at each other, either verbally or physically, and even when tensions are escalating, and then eventually something explodes and they can’t keep it together any more and they scream at their kids to just stop it.  And if their children WOULD just stop doing this, then of course our lives would be so much easier!  So can they just stop?!

Jen Lumanlan 01:34

I’m going to address the elephant in the room right up front and say that I’m a parent of one child, so I don’t have a problem with sibling rivalry.  I’ve never wanted to have more than one child because I’m selfish and I like the life I have with one child, and because I know I’m a better parent to one child than I could be to more than one.  And Carys has actually never wanted a sibling – we actually ask her, for fun, on a regular basis, just to see what she says, and she always says ‘no’ or buries her face in a pile of pillows or in some other way indicates that it would be a terrible idea.

Jen Lumanlan 02:07

But I have worked with a LOT of parents who have multiple children, and who have used the ideas I’m going to share here in this episode and have found RELIEF from the seemingly endless sibling fighting.  So I’ll walk you through how I worked with one family where the parents started out by saying: “My kids are always fighting and doing things to intentionally make the other one sad or scared.  It’s really stressful and triggering for me.  I can’t leave them together for 5 seconds because one of them will hurt the other one physically or emotionally.  We might have the same exact two toys and they each have one, and then the other will just go rip it out of the other person’s hand and throw it across the room.  And then it will end up getting physical.  I’m having a hard time even going to the bathroom some days because I never know what’s going to happen when they’re together.  Sometimes they can play together really well for a long time but then sometimes things go south immediately.”  And just a few weeks after saying that, this parent’s still very young children were able to start addressing many of the challenges they were having between themselves, without the parent even having to be involved at all.  So in this episode we’re going to talk through the factors that are involved in sibling fighting, which almost always go way deeper than whatever it is they are fighting about right now.  There are two main buckets of factors – things that are going on inside us, and things that are happening for our children.  It’s always easiest to focus on yourself first so let’s start there, and then we’ll move into what to do with your children.

Jen Lumanlan 03:39

So starting with ourselves, we need to understand why we are having such a big reaction to our children’s fighting.  And pretty often that happens for one of two reasons.  The first of these is that we had a crummy relationship with our siblings.  So maybe you were the oldest and you had to look out for the younger ones and they got to be kids and to push back and not be the responsible one, and you didn’t get to do that.  You were the enforcer, you had to keep them in line because your parents were working or had mental health challenges or other things going on that meant they couldn’t fully parent their children.  So you have a strained relationship with your siblings because of that.  Or maybe you weren’t the eldest or the biggest and your older and bigger sibling used to beat up on you.  That would have been a really difficult experience for you – you were probably afraid of your sibling, and tried to manage their feelings so that you wouldn’t set them off, and to a greater or lesser extent you lived under the threat of what this older and bigger person would do to you.  So when your children fight with each other, even if it’s objectively a very little disagreement, you have a narrative in your head about how if you don’t stop this now, they’re going to end up in the same dynamic that you did, with the bigger stronger one beating up on the smaller ‘weaker’ one, and the smaller one is going to get hurt, perhaps one time and perhaps many times in the future.

Jen Lumanlan 04:59

The important thing to recognize in this is that your children’s relationship is NOT the same as the relationship you had with your sibling.  It REMINDS you of the relationship with your sibling because you have a heightened awareness of tension.  All of your antennas are up and your radar is constantly scanning for any threat, and as soon as you see something that looks remotely like what happened between you and your sibling, your brain goes into that catastrophizing mode where you expect the worst.  But that isn’t our children’s thing to navigate.  That’s our thing to navigate.  We need to address the hurt that we’ve experienced, perhaps through therapy, so their probably relatively small squabbles don’t turn into a massive thing for us.  Not doing this healing work is always an option, but we may well find that you’re able to be around your children with more ease and calm if we do work on this.  And even if we think we can keep a lid on it now, we may well find that the kinds of struggles they have in the future escalate and trigger us then, so figuring out how to cope with it better now could really stand us in good stead.

Jen Lumanlan 06:01

So the other half of the stuff related to you is when you and your sibling or siblings had a great relationship. When you see your own children fighting, you again catastrophize and think, “Well, if they’re fighting like this now, how are they ever going to have the amazingly close relationship that I have with my siblings?”  And we panic and think that this is a thing that needs to be fixed URGENTLY.  Once again, this is our thing to navigate rather than theirs.  Just because they are squabbling now doesn’t mean they won’t be amazingly close later. And conversely, if they AREN’T squabbling now, that doesn’t mean they will be amazingly close later.  We can never know how our own relationship with someone else will turn out, never mind how the relationship between two other people is going to turn out.  We think that if we can prevent them from fighting now we’ll be doing everything we can to make sure they get on with each other later, but we have no way of knowing this.  All we can do is be here with what’s here now today.

Jen Lumanlan 07:00

So whichever of these things is true for you, the best thing you can do is to create a pause between your child’s behavior and your reaction.  You can use a lot of different tools to create that pause – parents I work with like to keep a hair tie on one wrist to remind them of their intention to be present with their children’s struggle, and before they do or say anything in these difficult moments they transfer the hair tie to the other wrist.  You can write down phrases that are meaningful to you – things like “My relationship with my children is the most important thing,” and post them on sticky notes around your house so you can look at them when you need them.  Creating that pause is a big part of what we do in the Taming Your Triggers workshop, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing else you can do.  Another part of what you can do is to look at why your children are fighting in the first place and address THAT, and then you won’t find yourself in these difficult situations nearly as often.  So that’s the second part of our episode here today.

Jen Lumanlan 07:52

When I ask parents why their children fight, they often say: “It just comes out of nowhere,” or “It happens for any one of 300 reasons – one of them has something the other one wants, or one of them is building something and the other one knocks it over, or one of them finds something the other one does to be really irritating.”

Jen Lumanlan 08:10

Once again, we can deal with these very different causes in different ways.  The important thing to keep in mind is that when our children are doing this behavior we find it so difficult, it’s always always always an attempt to meet an unmet need.  Our job is to be a needs detective to try to uncover the unmet need so we can help them to meet that need, and then they won’t fight as much any more.

Jen Lumanlan 08:34

The main thing we’re looking out for here is whether the difficulties are happening in one or a few kinds of situations over and over again, or whether they’re happening seemingly all the time across multiple types of situations.  Let’s start with the individual one off situations first, and I’m going to introduce children’s genders into a fictitious story just to make it easier to follow.  This example is actually taken from my book, which now has a title!  It’s called Parenting Beyond Power and is available for pre-order now, before it’s released on August 1!

Jen Lumanlan 09:04

Let’s say your four year old son is building a really tall block tower in the living room while you’re in another room nearby, and your two-year-old daughter comes running in and all of a sudden you hear a big crash as the blocks hit the floor, and then your two-year-old screams which usually means the four-year-old has hit her.  What do you do?  Just take a moment to put yourself in that situation, or a similar situation you’ve had with your child, and imagine what you might do, and what you would say to your child.

Jen Lumanlan 09:39

Okay, so let’s give this a whirl. Let’s try and imagine together how this conversation might go.  So maybe you come running into the living room and say: “Hey!  Stop it!  Don’t smack your sister like that!  We do not hit!”  Your son refuses to look at you, so you console little sister and say something like “There there; it’s OK; it’s not your fault,” and to your son you say: “What on earth were you thinking?”  Your son still avoids looking at you and says: “She knocked my tower over.”

Jen Lumanlan 10:08

And you had just about been able to keep a lid on your feelings up to this point but then it explodes and you say: “I don’t care!  You can build another one!  I know it’s hard to have something knocked down, but that’s no excuse.  Don’t hit your sister!  Go and sit in the corner for three minutes and when you come back, you’d better be ready to apologize to her.”  

 Jen Lumanlan 10:26

Your son goes and sits in the corner and when he comes back he says something that sounds vaguely like ‘sorry.’  So it seems like the interaction is over, and that the child has learned a lesson but what has really happened here?  Let’s walk this through step by step.

Jen Lumanlan 10:40

So the parent came in and judged one child as the aggressor and the other the victim.  The parent asked a rhetorical question about what the older child was thinking but they aren’t really asking to get an answer.  The child is feeling unsafe in that moment and completely disconnected from their parent, so they’re not going to say anything about how they’re really feeling.  These rhetorical questions are actually quite shame-inducing – you may be able to remember times when your own parents asked you these kinds of questions and how disconnecting it was to be on the receiving end.  You might have known that you had to respond, but that would never be with anything that actually revealed anything about yourself.  Then the parent created even more separation by sending the child to time out.  And this can seem like a reasonable option – after all, the child has to be punished in some way for hitting, right?  Otherwise they’ll think that hitting is acceptable and they’ll keep doing it.  The parent picks a Time Out as the least harmful punishment they can think of, and forces the child to apologize at the end, and superficially the situation is ‘fixed.’  But under the surface it’s anything but fixed.  We’ve either created or, more likely, widened, a rift between us and our child, and the child is probably feeling both angry and resentful toward their sibling – and toward their parent as well.  But what else are we supposed to do?  Doesn’t any alternative mean that we’re letting our child get away with behavior that we think is clearly unacceptable?  Well no, it doesn’t.  Let’s see how this interaction might go differently.

Jen Lumanlan 12:10

So the situation is the same: your son is in the living room building a block tower; you’re close by, but not in the same room, you hear your daughter come running into the living room and the crash as the blocks hit the floor followed by the scream.  What do you do?  Firstly, you use some of the tools we talked about in the first part of this episode and create a pause between your child’s behavior and your response.  So unless you think someone is in very grave danger at this point, rather than rushing into the situation, pause.  Transfer your hair tie from one wrist to the other.  Look at your sticky notes.  Take a deep breath.  Remind yourself of your intention and of what’s most important to you, and also that you don’t have to completely fix this situation right now.  You don’t have to teach your son a lesson in this moment; all you have to do is make sure everyone is safe.

Jen Lumanlan 12:59

So as you go into the room you’re looking for anyone who is hitting anyone else, or any other kind of danger, and separating children if that’s the case.  If anyone is hurt then of course you can comfort them, but try to do it in a way that doesn’t put any blame on anyone for what happened.  You don’t actually need to say anything in that moment.  You can just be with them with a calm presence, which hopefully IS actually a calm presence, because you haven’t been stuffing your feelings down; you’ve taken those few moments before you came into the room to re-regulate yourself.  If you do want to say something, it could be something as simple as: “Sounds like you’re both having a hard time right now, huh?”  or if you became dysregulated as well, you could say: “We’re all having a hard time right now, huh?”.  Then just sit with your children, with no need to do anything or fix anything or get anyone to learn any lesson in that moment.  Just be present with them.  If they want to talk about it you can engage, but if they don’t, that’s fine too.  Maybe they’ll pick up their play again or you might suggest that one child comes and does something with you.

Jen Lumanlan 14:04

Then, later, you could go to the older child and say something like: “Hey, I noticed we’ve been having a hard time when your toys are out in the living room.  Would it be OK if we chat about it?”  Notice the difference between this opening and the opening in the first version of this scenario.  The parent is coming in without blaming anyone and saying “WE’RE having a hard time,” not “you’re doing something wrong and you need to change your behavior.  The parent is also inviting the child into a discussion, and is willing to not have the discussion right now if the child doesn’t want to.  And you may be thinking “well, then my child just says they don’t want to talk about it and they get away with this unacceptable behavior!”, and my response would be that you can’t force them to have a conversation with you.  You can force them to listen while you talk, but you can’t force them to really share what’s going on with them.  You may have been doing the lectures for a while now already and so far it hasn’t encouraged your child to change their behavior.  

Jen Lumanlan 15:00

So you get out of the immediate situation with as much grace and connection as possible and then LATER, when everyone is re-regulated, you open up this conversation and invite your child to join you.  Assuming your child does indicate their willingness to participate, then you can say something like: “It seems like sometimes we have trouble when your toys are on the floor and your little sister is in the room.  She’s always really interested in what you’re doing, right?  And sometimes she knocks your tower over when you’re building.  What’s going on for you when that happens?”  When you ask this, you’re continuing your non-judgmental observation of the situation and inviting your child to share their feelings without saying “how do you feel about that,” which causes a lot of children to shut down.

Jen Lumanlan 15:40

Maybe your child says something like: “I don’t like it when she knocks my stuff over!”, and from this we can extrapolate how they’re feeling.  We don’t need them to tell us: “I’m feeling frustrated” to know they’re feeling frustrated.  We don’t need them to tell us they’re feeling anxious as soon as they hear little sister’s footsteps coming down the hallway.  We can even hold space for the child’s anger as his achievement is knocked down AGAIN.  And so then we empathize with something like: “Oh, I hear you!  I bet it’s really tough to have to keep an eye out for her all the time, and it must feel frustrating to have to start all over again when she knocks your stuff over or takes it.”  Then we’re watching our child closely, looking for some sort of acknowledgement.  We might get an enthusiastic “yeah!” or a nod or even just a nonverbal softening toward us.  Then we continue empathizing, and start looking for the child’s needs.  We might say something like: “Yeah, I would have a hard time with that too.  And I know I feel overwhelmed when you hit her because I need to keep her safe.  What were you trying to do earlier when she came in?”  Here the parent has identified their feeling of overwhelm, and their need for the younger sibling’s safety, and asked another indirect question to try to understand this child’s need.

Jen Lumanlan 16:55

And maybe the child responds: “I was trying to build the tallest tower ever!” and from there we can understand the child has a need for competence in building a tall tower, and space to do it in, and freedom from interference by their younger sibling.  We don’t need them to tell us this; we can extrapolate it based on what they DID tell us.

Jen Lumanlan 17:14

Again, we continue to empathize, and we also ask the child to consider their sibling’s perspective with something like: “Oh, that sounds like so much fun!  What do you think your sister was trying to do when she came in?”  Maybe the child has no idea and you have to supply an idea, or maybe the child can get us part of the way there saying something like: “I think she wanted to help, but she’s so annoying!  She always takes my stuff!”  And so the child is saying that his sister has a need for contribution in wanting to help.  

Jen Lumanlan 17:41

We add some more empathy and confirm this child’s assessment of the sibling’s need: “If I were you, I would probably find that annoying too.  I think she does want to help.  I wonder if she also just wanted to be close to you?  She really loves you.”  So he’s also identified another potential need for connection.

Jen Lumanlan 17:58

And so this child might respond: “I know, but I still don’t want her to do it.”  So he’s empathizing with his sister by saying “I know,” he’s also reasserting his own needs.  And then we might say: “I hear you.  So when she came in it sounds like you wanted to build a really tall tower, and you wanted space to do that.  And you also wanted the freedom to do it without your sister messing things up.  Is that right?”  And so the parent is restating this child’s needs and asking for confirmation, again we’re looking for the child to verbally agree or to nod or in some way move toward us to indicate that we’re on the right track.  And then we can say: “OK, and I need to know that your sister is safe, and she wants to help (so her need to contribute) and spend time with you (so her need for connection).  I wonder what we could do that can meet everyone’s needs?  

Jen Lumanlan 18:45

Now if you’re new to this way of working with children, don’t expect miracles here.  Your child is probably not going to produce a list of ways we can meet everyone’s needs, but what we’re doing is seeding the idea that meeting everyone’s needs is POSSIBLE.  So maybe they say “I don’t know,” and then the parent responds “Well, one option I see would be that you could build important stuff in your room with the door closed, and then your sister wouldn’t be able to mess up your tower.”  Obviously this parent is new to this approach and suggests an idea that doesn’t actually meet everyone’s needs.  It meets the needs that the parent and this child have stated, but it doesn’t meet the little sister’s needs for connection and contribution.  And then maybe the older sibling also realizes he has a need for connection and says: “I don’t want to be by myself in my room all the time.”  And then the parent comes up with another idea: “Well, what if we put up the old baby gates around an area in the living room, and you could build in there?  You could always pass stuff through to your sister when she wants to help, but she wouldn’t be able to get to your towers.  And you’d still be in the living room where we all hang out.  Would that work for you?”  And then the child responds: “Yeah! And I could put a few blocks out for her to play with so she could ‘help’ with those.”

Jen Lumanlan 19:50

And so what we’ve done here is identified each person’s needs in this interaction and come up with a preliminary plan to meet them.  We can try to put this plan into place and either it will ‘work,’ in that the tower won’t get knocked down and both children will have their needs for connection and collaboration met, which also meet’s the parent’s needs for safety – and their unstated need for ease and harmony.  But it’s also possible that putting the plan into action will help us to surface other needs, and the solution won’t ‘work,’ in which case we can go back and say “Hey, we thought this was going to help us but it doesn’t seem like it is.  Can we talk about it?  What’s not working for us?” and go from there.

Jen Lumanlan 20:30

At this point you might be thinking: ok, this sounds amazing, but how am I ever going to get the time to do it?  And how is it really going to help in the long term?  Aren’t I just going to have to have an endless number of these conversations?  And the answer to that is ‘no.’

Jen Lumanlan 20:45

It’s impossible for me to think about sibling struggles without thinking back to parents Adrianna and Tim, whom I worked with for over a year.  I interviewed them last year, and I’d like to play you a couple of excerpts of our conversation.  We’ll start with them parenting one pretty easy-going child, and then all the struggles that come with adding a second child came along:

Adrianna 21:05

So Bodie, our five-year-old when he was young, he was really easy-going. I remember we lived in West Boylston, so. He was probably right around two when he had a tantrum. And I remember being like, “I think this is like his first real show of like defiance.” Like, he doesn’t do this. Like he listens. He’s logical. He doesn’t take risks. We thought we were like parents of the year and so it really got challenging. I think when we had a second child I think that’s when we really felt like we were absolutely drowning.

Tim 21:47 Yeah, I really think I felt – and I think we’re doing that as well, that we were like killing it at being parents. So that they really – the best parents ever with the best kid ever. And we were just so great. And he was so great. And it was so easy. Not always easy, but then it’s just you get a second child and–

Adriana 22:36 Yeah, I mean, I think that we got to a point where it was like, I mean, I just remember, like, being in the car, and both kids, both of our kids do not like the car at all. They’re so good at it now, though. But they did not like being in the car. And that really is not easy at all. So we were like driving and I’m driving and Bodie is upset. And Remy is upset. And you just get to this, like, insane point where like, “I’m mad at her. Because they’re out of control.” And I know it’s not our fault, you know, but I still can’t help it be mad at her for it, for no reason at all. And just didn’t like that feeling at all, of just like having this out of control, like insane thoughts going on of being mad at my wife, because the kids are crying.

Jen Lumanlan 23:36

What was that like for you, Adrianna?

Adrianna 23:40 So, honestly, to be totally transparent, like, I would say, like the first two years of having a second child, I really struggled with postpartum depression and anxiety and like, it really shaped how I was able to manage parenting. And like, I still have these values of being respectful and treating my children the way they deserve to be treated. But I think that, like not treating my mental health problems. Because it’s more than just like, go take a bath, it’s going to be fine. Like I really needed to do some bigger things, and that the baths totally helped. But there was more to be done. And I think that it just felt impossible. So having the two kids is hard on its own for anybody, but then dealing with those mental health challenges on top of it, not being honest and open with my family about what’s really going on for me, and just like keeping a lot of it to myself. It was a really, really hard time.

Tim 24:46 Yeah. And I think that you know, that was impossible because it was like we both wanted to do well so bad, and we’re like reading books, and practicing things, and like practicing mindfulness and meditating, and like doing in-service work and just like doing everything we can, and still falling short and just being exhausted and falling short all the time.

Adrianna 25:12 And just waiting to stop surviving. Yeah. We just, you know, like, when are we gonna stop just surviving? When are we going to stop drowning? When is this going to be okay? And I do think when your kids get older things get easier. But I also think when you’re able to have like an internal shift of how you look at things that is a big game changer, too. Yeah. 

Jen Lumanlan 25:27

It was actually Adrianna that I quoted at the beginning of this episode, who couldn’t even go to the bathroom without the two children laying into each other.  She and I had talked about the ideas that I’ve shared in this episode on our group coaching calls, and other parents commented on her post with ideas based on these principles and empathized with how hard it is, and said that it DOES get easier, and suddenly something clicked about understanding each other’s needs.

Jen Lumanlan 25:54

One night their four-year-old, Bodie, didn’t want to go to bed.  Tim told Bodie it was bed time.  Bodie said: “But Daddy, Mama would ask me what was going on for me and we would come up with ideas together.”  So they did that, and they found that Bodie didn’t want to stop coloring because he was feeling worried that he would forget what colors he wanted to use.  They quickly realized that Tim could write down Bodie’s ideas about what colors to use, and then remind him in the morning.  Bodei was thrilled, and happily went to bed. 

Jen Lumanlan 26:20

Just a few days later, Adrianna posted in the community again and said “I hope it’s OK to share another win here.  You are the only people who would understand and I am just so amazed.”  And here’s what happened:

Adrianna 26:29

She came in was trying to like color on his paper. And he was like, “Wait a second, Remy, let’s talk about this. What do you need right now?” And she said, “I just really wanted some extra playtime with you because you spend so much time coloring lately.” And he said, “Okay, what if I stop coloring for a few minutes and go play with you?” And she said, “Okay.” Then they play together.

Tim 26:47

Yeah, magical.

Jen Lumanlan 26:49

And they were how old at that time?

Adrianna 26:51

Maybe like just three and four.

Jen Lumanlan 26:56

So it IS possible to use these tools not just between you and your child, but the more you use them, the more they’ll start to see each other’s feelings and needs as well, and look for ways to meet both of their needs.  Your children don’t need to be very old, either.  You just get started, and they pick up on it from doing it with you.

Jen Lumanlan 27:13

OK, let’s move on to our last category of ways this fighting can show up, which is when it seems to come out of nowhere, and it’s constantly happening every day.  The more you see it as happening in many situations, the more likely that this has more to do with each child’s relationship with you, rather than a struggle they’re having between the two of them.

 Jen Lumanlan 27:35

I think we can’t really fully appreciate how much adding a sibling rocks an older child’s world.  They were the apple of our eye, and we spent a LOT of time together, and we kept track of ALL their milestones, and then all of a sudden there’s another person in the family who is taking all of the parents’ time and attention and it’s almost like the older sibling is out in the cold.  Especially if the older sibling is several years older than the baby we expect the older one to be able to wait, and to not have tantrums when they can’t get their way immediately.  We know that children think that bad things that happen in their family are their fault.  The child thinks the parent is the best thing ever, so if the parent is shouting at the child then the child can’t think: “Oh, my parent is shouting at me, they’re having a hard time;” the child thinks: “My parent is shouting at me, so there must be something wrong with me.”  When we’re constantly short-tempered and telling our older children to wait, and reminding them how much they love their new sibling (when in reality they may have decidedly mixed feelings about it), the child assumes that their parent is the one who is right, and there must be something wrong with them, the child.  

Jen Lumanlan 28:42

Then a power dynamic often builds up where the parents are constantly telling the older child what to do and what not to do and to be gentle with the baby and to not hit their sibling, and the child knows that hitting the parent isn’t acceptable, and they have all of this frustration and anger and this comes out as hitting the sibling.  One thing we can really do to help our children here is to allow them to feel all the difficult feelings they may have about being an older sibling.  Even if we think we’re being pretty understanding, it can be really hard for us to hear our older child say something like: “I wish we didn’t have a baby,” and all the feelings we’re having about wanting them to get along, and wanting things to just be a little bit easier right now come out in our interactions with the older child and our frustration with them.  The more we can lean into hearing them when they express how much they don’t want to have a sibling, the more our older child is going to hear the message: “My parent loves and accepts me just the way I am, no matter what I say or do.”

Jen Lumanlan 29:43

If your child is on the older side, so the new sibling is a toddler or already even older, and perhaps there’s even a second sibling on the way or already here, if the oldest has never had a chance to process the huge loss they’ve experienced, you might try to create some space for them to do that.  You could talk with them about how they have a hard time with things their sibling does.  They may not even consciously remember a time when their sibling wasn’t around, but they still hold what it feels like to be the only child in their implicit memory, which is where we store impressions and images and feelings from our early childhood even though we can’t tell a coherent story about it.  All that stuff is still buried in there, both for our children and for us as well.  They may well need to be able to say that sometimes they don’t like their sibling, or even hate their sibling, and wish they could have you all to themselves.  And when you think about how to respond to that, just think about how you might want your own partner to respond when you’re having a hard time.  Many of our partners probably try to fix the situation when we’re struggling, or offer helpful hints for things that we should do differently, and many of us get absolutely exasperated when that happens because what do we actually want?  We just want someone to listen to us and not judge us and maybe reassure us a bit.  We usually don’t want solutions, or reminding that things can’t be the way we wish they could be.  Our children are just the same, so reminding them how they can’t be the only child again is not going to help.  Instead we can just be with them in the hard stuff, and empathize, and rub their back or give them a hug if that would feel good, and that is really enough.

Jen Lumanlan 31:24

If you’re seeing a lot of competitive behavior, or hitting and squabbling across many kinds of situations, what you’re probably seeing is an unskillful attempt to meet a need for connection with you.  If you’re thinking “how on earth could that be true?,” then I’d invite you to think about how often we adults, with fully developed prefrontal cortexes and a lot more understanding of ourselves and how the world works, use unskillful strategies to try to meet our needs.  I often think back to a time when I got sick of being the one who unloaded the dishwasher every single flipping day.  I picked a fight with my husband about it because he gets up late in the mornings and *never* unloads the dishwasher.  So what happened here is that I decided on a strategy that was going to help me to meet my need.  My need was for collaboration and I had decided that my husband unloading the dishwasher was the ONLY strategy that was going to meet my need, and I picked a fight with him with a goal of getting my need met.  Now in hindsight, of course I can see the mistakes I made.  If I have a need for collaboration with my husband, there are 100 ways that I could ask for help to get that need met.  A few of those involve a dishwasher, but the vast majority of them do not.  Instead of using my unskillful attempt of picking a fight to get my needs met, I could have approached him and said something like: “Hey, I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed at the moment because I’m working really long hours.  I’d like to feel more of a sense that we’re on the same team than I’ve felt recently.  Have you noticed it too?  Would you be willing to help me to do X?  And are there some things I can help you with that would make your life easier?”  And if I’d approached him in that way I’m almost 100% sure he would have been receptive to helping me meet my need, instead of reacting defensively.

Jen Lumanlan 33:10

So let’s bring this back to our children.  When our children are fighting with each other, you can imagine that they’re doing what I was doing when I picked the fight with my husband.  They’re using an unskillful strategy to try to meet one or more needs.  So how can we possibly know what needs they have?  Well, I’d be willing to go out on a limb and say that a couple of needs are most likely at the top of the list here. Firstly, there’s a connection with you. When your child picks a fight with their sibling, they know you’re going to be on them lickety split. They probably WISH that they could have your positive attention, but they’ll take your negative attention over no attention at all.  So they pick a fight with their sibling in an unskillful attempt to meet their need for connection with you by doing something to get your attention.

Jen Lumanlan 33:55

Another important unmet need they may have is to be known and understood.  We ALL have some variation on that need, even our children.  We want to know that someone else sees us for who we really are, who ‘gets’ us, and who loves us not only in spite of all the weirdnesses we have, but maybe even BECAUSE of them.  I want that, I’m pretty sure you want that, and I’m pretty sure your child wants it too.  And when they pick a fight with their sibling, once again they’re using an unskillful strategy to tell you: “Hey!  You’re not seeing me!  You’re not seeing what’s really important to me, and what I’m struggling with, and WHY I’m behaving the way I’m behaving.  I’m feeling frustrated and angry and I don’t know how to tell you that and I don’t think you would hear me if I told you.  I know I’ll get yelled at if I hit you, and this anger has to come out somehow, so I’m going to hit someone in our family who has less power than me because I don’t know what else to do.”  When we think about it in this way, it’s heartbreaking, right?  If we can imagine our child saying something like this to us, does it create any more empathy for their situation, and any desire to try to come toward them, instead of requiring them to change their behavior?

Jen Lumanlan 35:05

The answer to all of these unmet needs is to spend some 1:1 time with our children.  It can be as little as 10 minutes a day, but the important aspects of this are that it’s predictable, and that the child gets to decide what you do during the time.  You can even call it ‘special time,’ so it feels really special to them.  If you’ve done special time with your child before, you may have found that no matter how much you give them, they always want more.  And making it predictable really helps with that.  Most likely, when it’s a one off thing, the child always wants to wring every last minute out of it this time because they never know when they’re going to get it again.  When you make it predictable you take away that fear that they’re never going to get it again, and you also make it easier to hold a boundary and say: “We’ve had special time today.  We can have more special time tomorrow.”  If you can, allow your child to say WHEN in the day the special time happens.  Most of us have a pretty deeply embedded idea that we should work first and play when work is done, which means that when our child asks to play we’ll often respond: “I can’t play right now because I have to work.”  Things really shifted for my daughter and me when I realized that unless I was on a call, I really could just shift my work time back a little bit and play with her first.  Then she was willing to work with me on a whole lot of things where previously she had been pushing back.  

Jen Lumanlan 36:25

Allowing the child to direct the play does two things – firstly, it allows you to show how much importance you put on their ideas.  I know this isn’t always easy.  We went through a solid month-long stretch where my daughter wanted me to help her sort rocks in our garden every single day during our special time.  I had a lot of mental resistance to that, because it was such a meaningless activity.  But she really enjoyed it, and I ended up using it as my mindfulness practice.  I realized that if I actually focused on what was happening in the moment, that the sun on my arms felt good, and the rocks were sort of interesting, and she really felt connected to me, and the experience actually wasn’t terrible.  I’ve worked with a lot of parents who have really struggled with this, and who cannot bring themselves to do pretend play without seeing the cobwebs on the bookshelves and using the time to mentally build a to-do list.  Being present with our children can be hard because we might not know how to play with them in what they consider to be the ‘right’ way.  We open ourselves up for rejection, because they may say we’re doing it wrong, or just not engage with us.  We might mess up the first few times we do it, but if we keep trying we’ll probably find a number of activities we can do together that are at least bearable for us and that fill our child’s cup, and then it becomes easier to do.

Jen Lumanlan 37:48

Parents often try to treat each of their children exactly the same, but that almost always backfires – because each child is a unique person with their own unique needs.  If you have a sibling you can probably look back and see what you needed from your parents or caregivers, and what your sibling needed from them, and how different those two things were.  If your parents tried to treat you equally, it’s possible neither of you got what you really needed.  You can also see this in your relationships today – maybe with a partner or a very close friend, when you think of the things the other person enjoys doing and how they communicate and how they want to be supported when they’re having a hard time.  That may be very different from the things you enjoy doing and how you communicate and how you want to be supported when you’re having a hard time, so if a person were to treat you both the same then some pretty big needs would be missed. When we can see each sibling’s unique needs and help them to meet those needs, they almost certainly won’t fight as much.  Nobody likes fighting with other people, even if your child says they do like it, or that they are annoying their sibling on purpose.  They like it to the extent that having some power over someone else feels better than them having power over you.  But getting your needs met feels better than both of those things, so if we can help them to do that, then they won’t fight any more.

Jen Lumanlan 39:06

 I reached out to Adrianna a year after she and Tim recorded the conversation with me to find out how things were going, and to see if she would be willing to contribute a story for my book.  And this is what she sent me:

Jen Lumanlan 39:16

She said, “Growing up in an abusive household, followed by years of drug addiction, didn’t exactly set me up for success as a parent.  All I knew is I needed to not be like my parents, but I had no idea how to navigate parenting respectfully while also managing mental health challenges. I knew early on as a parent that my values often didn’t match my actions, but I didn’t know what else to do.  I thought power struggles, sibling squabbles, and “just surviving” were normal parts of parenthood.  

Jen Lumanlan 39:46

The tools I learned from Jen changed everything about my relationships with my children (and even my husband!). When I learned to have problem solving conversations with my children, and really hear and see them, we were able to work through challenges I never thought possible – and now they do this between themselves as well too, without me needing to step in!  Even on the (now rare) occasions when my children are simultaneously having a hard time and both want to be in physical contact with me, they work with me to figure out how they can both do that without me feeling overwhelmed. Life is far from perfect but my family is really thriving – and I know these life-changing tools will help us with whatever challenges come our way.  Parenting is finally fun!”

Jen Lumanlan 40:32

And then we emailed back and forth a bit and she wrote to me: “It’s just so cool to reflect back on where I was a year ago. I literally dreaded parenting. I counted down the minutes until I got a break. What a difference to really look forward to things I used to dread. Thanks again for everything!”

Jen Lumanlan 40:32

So if your siblings are at each other’s throats all the time right now, I hope this episode has helped you to understand a bit more about why that’s the case, and some of the things you can do to shift their dynamic – that will also make parenting easier and more joyful for you.

Kelly Peterson 41:07

Hi, I’m Kelly Peterson from Chicago, Illinois. I’m a Your Parenting Mojo fan. And I hope you enjoyed the show as much as I do. If you found this episode, especially enlightening or useful, you can donate to help Jen produce more content like this. And also save us both from those interminable mattress ads you hear on other podcasts, then you can do that. And also subscribe on the link that Jen just mentioned. Thanks for listening.