Sibling Rivalry

Sibling Rivalry

Sibling rivalry is one of humanity's oldest problems. One of the first stories in the Bible deals with the rivalry between two brothers, Cain and Abel. The older brother, Cain, was irritated at constantly having to help take care of his younger brother, Abel, and kept asking his parents: "Am I my brother's keeper?" The story of these two brothers has a tragic ending; Cain becomes so angry that he kills Abel. The fact that this is one of the first stories within the Bible shows the great importance given to the problem of sibling rivalry.

By "sibling rivalry" we mean the hostility between brothers and/or sisters, which turns itself into situations ranging from common children's fights to more serious cases such as permanent hatred between adult siblings.

It is not difficult to find the root cause of sibling rivalry. Nature offers us many examples. In nature, the competition is usually for food. For example, as baby sharks develop within the mother shark's womb, the biggest baby shark devours all of his brothers and sisters, ensuring for himself all of the available food resources. In another example, eagles make their nests at great heights, in mountains or trees. The first baby eaglet that is born kills all his sibling eaglets by pushing them out from the nest as they come out of their eggs. That way all the food that the mother eagle brings will be only for him. A similar competition exists between siblings in human families. However, here the scarce resources are the TIME, ATTENTION, LOVE and APPROVAL that the parents can give to each of their children. Looking at this situation in very simple terms, if the parents have only a certain limited amount of exclusive time to give to ALL their children, it is easy to see that if there is only ONE child in that family, ALL of the parents' available time will be for that only child; if there are TWO children in the family, then each child can have HALF of the parents' time: and so on.

A young child cannot yet reason very well - bear in mind that he or she is just beginning to learn to speak. However, even at this young age, the child's EMOTIONAL feeling is well developed. In addition, what he or she feels is an intense DISLIKE for this new situation, and associates this disagreeable situation with the new baby. To complicate the child's frustration, this new situation goes on and on. Remember that, for a child, one day is a very long time, and a week may seem like an eternity. To make matters worse, this is happening just as the first-born is entering one of the most difficult and frustrating life-periods, for both the child and the parents, the so-called "terrible twos." Part of the problem is that the human mind tends to process emotional impulses before it processes conscious thoughts. Without knowing, the older child begins to look for ways to try to get the parents to "stop loving" the younger one. Later, the first-born will also begin to directly irritate and bother the younger child. When the parents become aware of this, they will reprimand and may punish the older child. However the problem continues. Punishing the older sibling simply makes him or her develop more discrete ways irritate the younger one that the parents will not be able to detect. In the beginning, the younger sibling is unaware of a problem in the family unit. The older child begins to feel increasingly threatened by the presence of another attention-getter in the household and begins to react by taking out their frustrations on the younger. At first, the younger child's capacity for action is rather limited. As the younger child begins to mature, he or she will begin developing ways to stop the older sibling's attacks. The easiest of these is to tattle. This makes the parent scold the older child and stops the attack - for the moment. The truth is that, from the beginning, the younger sibling has very little chance of winning in this fight. As he or she grows up, this continual losing against the older sibling is a source of great frustration for the younger child. This is one of the reasons why, to