Raising Parents Inc

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  Sibling Rivalry is Optional

  28-Mar-2025

  I just spent about half an hour trying to find the blog post I wrote years ago about Louise Hart's lovely book The Winning Family. Clearly, I'm hallucinating because it doesn't exist... The blog. Not the book. The book is real...

  Sadly, this book is long out of print --but you might find a copy used somewhere-- so I'd like to give you the rough outline of the parts of it I recall... and what I've come across that supports her writing since. (Ooh, ooh! When I searched for the cover image I discovered that with her daughter she's written a 35th anniversary edition, called The Winning Family... where no one has to lose!!!)

  Parents Set the Tone

  While lots of parents feel that their children run the house, and rule the roost, and run roughshod over them, the base reality is it's parent who are in charge of the atmosphere of the home. Parents lead everything from 'how do we handle conflict here' to 'how to do we talk about food choices here'... and most especially 'how do we really treat one another here.' 

  Kids learn their attitudes, beliefs, and boundaries from the adults around them. What adults allow, kids may do. What adults don't allow, kids may still do, not with impunity, and more and more secretively over the years. What adults do, children will almost certainly mimic --at least until they work out their own reasons not to.

  So, when parents believe 'sibling rivalry is normal,' so do the kids.

  For example: a family around the corner from our house had a boy and a girl. She was younger by at least a few years, and a lot smaller... and 'kids fighting is normal' meant that he was allowed to pound on her at will, anytime. Any reason. Until he felt like stopping. I don't think they're still friends... Their mom was deeply disoriented when she tried to get my kids (8 and 10? Maybe 9 & 11 at the time) to agree with her that 'all kids fight...' and they couldn't figure out what she was talking about. One tentatively said, 'well, we used to argue about who got to play SIMs longer...'

  My kids (and the kids in my daycare, and the children of most of my social network) were not expected to fight, allowed to fight however they thought up, or bicker relentlessly. The key difference from my perspective is that I knew what that kind of acrimony at home did to people: exhibit A ~ my sister who hated me and blamed me for how I (the good child, who rarely got in trouble) treated her in front of our parents. Sorry, sis. I was nine. The people in charge of stopping that were right in front of it.

  Also, lots of other stories from the people around me, from when I started collecting stories like this in my teens, often with years of witnessing the fallout in families I knew well enough to know what had happened and how it was playing out, long term.

  As a friend puts it: whether your expectations are high or low, your kids will life up (or down) to them...

  My kids were expected to get along.

  Children Can Get Along

  With many stories of her kids helping each other out, well into their teens (culminating in a lovely story about the younger kids planning, hosting and staffing a formal grad party for the eldest) Louise shares the fact that in most of the world, since the beginning of time, getting along is actually normal.

  In mixed-age groups, children are influenced (and guided) by older kids who've had more experience in their culture and with the rules, and being gently led toward things that are okay and away from things that are not, with whom they spend their waking hours. They are all overseen by young adults, their own parents, and others at all times. Adults rarely intervene, because they can see the older kids are handling things just as they would. 

  There are few reasons for conflict, and lots of examples of respect, negotiation, collaboration and cooperation for kids to learn from, and mimic --as little kids are primed to do. 

  Kids are, quite naturally, outnumbered by people older than themselves, starting at about 99-to-1 and ending up at less than 10-to-1 when they're in their teens... 

  Something in Our Culture is Broken

  Along the way, what with industrialization and densification, long factory and mining hours, and leaving social networks behind for the city (foundling hospitals taking in hundreds of babies a week, orphanages overrun by children and being run by the people who made it clear why orphanages were terrible for people and society...) we broke our safe, gentle social safety networks that families had lots of support in, and along the way we lost our way.

  We lost track of whose job it is to show kids 'how to be' in our society, and left it to schools and then preschools, and then toddler daycares, and then infant daycares, where kids outnumber adults from 4-to-1 to 1000-to-1. Where kids learn to survive in what is essentially The Wild West: far too many people with many unmet needs with far too few cops to do anything but bare 'behaviour management' [read: punishment-and-reward style control.]

  One of the things I said, to everyone who told me, 'kids can work it out by themselves,' was, 'not a lot of 6-year-olds can develop UN-level negotiation skills independently...' but apparently they're expected to.

  With parents who struggle to negotiate the price of a used car, kids are supposed to 'sort it out' without help?

  This is an unreasonable expectation, but it's easy to see where it came from:

  Generation upon generation of kids who grew into adults with little to no support in learning to advocate for themselves, communicate their needs well, or negotiate cooperatively or fairly, now facing squabbling toddlers and repeating what they heard, 'they need to learn to work it out themselves.'

  They Need to Learn to Work It Out
  
  Yes, they do. But they won't learn it by themselves.

  P.S. I mean it about Louise Hart's lovely book. See if you can find a copy of  The Winning Family for yourself!

   

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