In Defense of Sibling Rivalry

It all started off very sweetly. My daughter, Joanna, was 18 months old when Benjy came into the world. She greeted her new baby brother as the most fun doll a little girl could ever have. She cooed at him and tried to feed him his bottle. She kissed him, and pretended to be his mommy—“Oh, Benjy, it’s OK, honey,” she would say when he cried, and they have gotten along beautifully ever since.

Sounds sweet, right? Well, yes and no. Over the years, their cooperation has increasingly become a problem. Instead of doing what we tell them, they have become partners in crime. Benjy, for instance, has developed an excessive attachment to his pacifier (“Bobby”) and his bunny-blanket (“Nunny”), night-time sleep soothers that we would like to gradually wean him off of. Joanna has made herself the primary obstacle to our campaign. Last year—with Benjy approaching 3—we started to confiscate and hide Bobby and Nunny during non-sleep hours. Joanna indignantly sussed them out and delivered them to her brother.

When I said he couldn’t take them to the pool because they would get soaked, she appointed herself his counsel. “OK, I’ll give you a deal,” she told me, very business-like. “We’ll give Benjy his Nunny now, and we’ll take it away when we get to the water.” Not long ago, my wife reminded him of his commitment to give up Bobby altogether when he turns 4. “I have to discuss it with my sister,” he said, and they returned with a counter-proposal. Instead of 4, how about 87?

You can find a stack of books giving parents advice on how to stop sibling rivalry. But what about the constituency that needs to increase sibling rivalry? The parental-advice industry has ignored us completely. I am not arguing for excessive competition between children, only a healthy middle ground. Imagine that your children are Coke and Pepsi. You don’t want them to drop dead rats into each others’ bottles or send out hooligans to beat up anybody seen drinking the opposing product. On the other hand, you don’t want them colluding to set prices, either. You want a healthy middle ground of competition without enmity. Many families are in dead-rat territory. My family is with the colluders.

Sometimes I can foil them with artificial ways to foster competition, and drive a wedge between them. Who can make it upstairs for bath time fastest? Who can put on their shoes first? It’s a race! Compete for Daddy’s approval! It’s my best technique for breaking up the duopolistic behavior cartel. (Alternatively, I could increase competition by adding a third supplier to the market, but I’m faced with heavy barriers to entry, including, but not limited to, the pain of childbirth, the cost of adding another bedroom to the house, and future college tuition.)

The most common way they fail to respect our authority is through acts of passive civil disobedience. In our family, there is no such thing as asking the children to put on their shoes or brush their teeth and then having them do it. They will respond to any such command not with rejection, but a kind of vague, detached agreement, as if I had expressed a generalized wish for nice weather or world peace. Sometimes I can force compliance through repeated requests escalating into threats of punishment. But usually when I am concentrating on one of the children, the other will cause a distraction elsewhere—Joanna will demand a hair accessory we don’t have, or Benjy will start to remove the shoes I’ve forced him to wear —and so the process will continue, back and forth.

A family is supposed to be a dictatorship, with the parents collectively playing the role of Khamenei (only without the nutty figurehead and sham election). Any dictatorship can be brought down if the people decide to band together and disobey the established rules. This is why the people must be divided against each other.

The people, however, are only getting stronger. These days, Benjy is old enough to play the instigator. A bit more than a year ago, we caught Joanna drawing all over our coffee maker with a magic marker. This was a major taboo. The kids were drawing on everything in the house—bookshelves, windows, each other, you name it. I would lecture them almost daily. “When you start to draw on something, ask yourself one question—Is this paper? If the answer is no, do NOT draw on it.” Yet here was Joanna scrawling all over something that could not possibly be mistaken for a sheet of paper. So we made her go into time out, which meant sitting buckled into a booster seat.

Joanna began to yell, “I’m an art person! Mommy gave me time out because I’m an art person!” As I later discovered, she had been visiting my parents’ house, and inquired as to how they made all the art displayed in the house. My parents explained that the art was actually the work of artists, people dedicated to the craft of art. Joanna apparently decided, based on her voluminous body of pre-school work, that she qualified as an “artist,” and thus was no longer bound to follow our narrow bourgeois standards of what constituted proper art. (You will probably also find among the Iranian street protesters a higher than average percentage of self-defined “artists.”)

“Benjy, get me out of here!” she yelled.  Her brother sprang into action. As if executing an intricately-rehearsed plot, he grabbed a pair of nail scissors and tried to cut the strap on her booster seat. It was a moment of double terror for us. On the one hand, she could fall out of her chair and hurt herself. But equally horrifying, she could use the fall as yet more proof for Benjy that they were both victims of the oppressive regime.

Illustration by Deanna Staffo.

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