Sibling rivalry and conflict
Jealousy, competition and fighting between brothers and sisters, over toys, space, attention and fairness. Some conflict is near universal and sits alongside warmth in the same relationship. It becomes a concern when it turns into repeated aggression, or one child is mostly on the receiving end.
What drives it
Siblings share a limited supply of parents, and each new child changes the shares. Fights also give children a place to practice arguing, losing and making up. For identification the label helps separate ordinary squabbling from a pattern where one child keeps getting hurt, which the research suggests matters more than it is often given credit for.
How it shows
Work
Adults who fought hard with a sibling may watch every share at work, from desk space to who got thanked in the meeting, and feel an old sting when a peer is praised.
Relationships
The back seat on a long drive: ‘she’s touching me’, ‘he started it’. The same argument over the front seat every school morning. A parent spends the evening refereeing and goes to bed feeling they let both children down.
Self
Notice which fights you step into and which you let run, and whether the same child is usually the one who ends up crying.
What tells it apart
Parental favoritism (differential treatment): When the fights keep coming back to ‘you always take his side’, parental differential treatment may be part of what feeds them.
Family roles (golden child, scapegoat, lost child, mascot): Family roles such as golden child and scapegoat are fixed parts a family hands out. Sibling rivalry is more likely ordinary when the winner and loser change from day to day.
Jealousy: Jealousy is the feeling that a rival threatens a bond. Sibling rivalry is the wider pattern of competing and fighting, and jealousy may be one part of it.
A test
For a week, note who starts, who ends up hurt and how each fight ends. Fights that switch direction and end in play again are more likely ordinary rivalry. One child repeatedly hurt, scared or giving up their things may point to sibling aggression, which the research treats as harmful.
Questions to carry
- In the last fight I broke up, whose side did I take before I knew what happened?
- What did I learn about fairness from my own brothers and sisters, or from having none?
Go deeper
- Read: The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child, Alan E. Kazdin with Carlo Rotella, 2008. Written for parents by a Yale psychologist who spent decades testing parent management training: praise and small rewards for the behavior a parent wants to see, built up in small steps. That approach has many controlled trials behind it with children referred for defiance and aggression, though Kazdin's own 1997 review said questions remained about how large, wide and lasting the effects are. The book itself does not walk through the studies. It carries the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies' Self-Help Seal of Merit.
How strong the research is
moderate. Fights between young siblings are frequent and mostly short: one study (Perlman and Ross) counted about 7 to 8 disputes an hour between siblings aged 2 to 4. Laurie Kramer (Child Development Perspectives, 2010) argues that sibling relationships mix warmth and conflict, and that less fighting does not by itself make them warmer. In a US national survey of 3,599 children (Tucker, Finkelhor, Turner and Shattuck, Pediatrics, 2013), 32% had been on the receiving end of at least one kind of sibling aggression in the past year, and even one incident went with more distress. In a randomized trial of the SIBS program (Feinberg, McHale and colleagues, 2013), siblings had more positive interactions and fewer internalizing problems, and their mothers reported fewer symptoms of depression.
Where it comes from
Judy Dunn and Carol Kendrick, Siblings: Love, Envy, and Understanding, Harvard University Press, 1982. Laurie Kramer, 2010. The SIBS program of Mark Feinberg and Susan McHale