Tips to Encourage Sibling Relationships

So often when I write about siblings, it’s about how to best manage the bickering and the fighting or how to get them to stop grabbing toys from each other. Happily, this post is about ways to encourage their relationships!

• Teach social skills in general – If your children have difficulty taking turns or grabbing toys from each other, avoid putting pressure on their individual relationship by saying things like, “you need to take turns with your brother.” Rather teach them about turn taking in general and let the skill trickle down to their relationship. Keep your language on the behavior, “when you want a turn, you need to ask first.” For creative ways to teach social skill, read https://parentingbydrrene.com/2014/08/15/12-ways-to-coach-good-behaviors/.
• Encourage listening to others – If your children have difficulty listening to each other, it can be helpful to reinforce their words to each other. This would be saying “did you hear her?  She said, ‘stop that!’ What does that mean to you.” or, “I heard him say that he doesn’t like being poked. That means you should stop.” For creative ways to teach listening, read https://parentingbydrrene.com/2012/02/18/teach-them-to-listen/.
• Coach positive ways to handle conflicts – When there is a conflict, help children to brainstorm solutions and weigh their options.  Teach them to empathize with the other.
• Find low pressure activities they can share – If they enjoy working on puzzles together, doings arts and crafts or kicking a ball back and forth, encourage it often.
• Plan for time together and time apart – It’s fine to give them breaks from each other as well.  It can be helpful for kids to have time during the day that they can play alone in their rooms, or have an activity that doesn’t have to be shared.
• Allow sleepovers – We allow sleepovers as often as they’d like.  When the girls moved from toddler beds to big kids beds, we got them each a trundle so they could easily have sleepovers with each other.
• Encourage them to help each other and highlight when they do – In my family, we talk often about helping each other. It became a given that when someone asks for help, you help as much as you can. We highlight and appreciate when family members are helpful.
• Avoid pitting them in competition – I am a firm believer in teaching kids to manage competition, and am fine with siblings playing board games and backyard sports.  Bigger sports competition should be with peers. Also avoid daily doses of competition such as, “let’s see who can get dressed first. Ready, go!” Rather, pit them in a cooperative effort, “let’s see if you can help each other get dressed before me.”
• Offer cooperative efforts – This can be cooking together or building pillow forts. There are cooperative effort board games like Snails Pace Race or Colorama. There are a few good idea books titled Everybody Wins by MacGregor and Cooperative Games and Sports by Orlick.
• Have at least one joint chore – Cooperative efforts carry over to chores as well. Across ages, it can be helpful to for children to share responsibilities. For young children, this can be helping with pet care. For older children, this can be cleaning a shared bathroom weekly.
• Avoid comparisions – Avoid direct comparisons, “why can’t you be more like your sister?” and indirect, “your sister is always on time!” Comparisons are a seed of sibling rivalry. For other hints about rivalry, read https://parentingbydrrene.com/2014/05/15/a-few-hints-to-avoid-sibling-rivalry/. There’s also a great parenting book titled Siblings Without Rivalry by Faber and Mazlish.
• Discipline individually – As best you can, avoid discipline for one child spilling over onto siblings. If one child is throwing sand at the playground say, “if you throw sand, you will have to come out of the sandbox,” rather than, “if you throw sand, we are all going home.”
• Praise individually – Avoid praising one child to curb their sibling’s behavior. Don’t say, “look how neatly your brother keeps his room!” rather say, “your room is a mess. Go clean it please.”
• Make a sibling photo album – It’s nice for kids to have their own photo albums as well as a shared sibling album. This one is tough as it’s hard enough to keep family photos organized, but it’s worth the effort.
• Tell stories about their good times – It can be helpful to remind them of their good times often. We tell a lot of stories about how Alicen welcomed Claire home from the hospital, and funny stories from when they were in preschool and early grade school.
• Model and speak positively about your own sibling relationships – When you speak about your own siblings, either growing up together or getting along now, you are modeling how to speak and feel about siblings. Yes, some conflict is normal in life, and it’s fine to share but avoid being negative, name calling and complaining.
• Use positive discipline – Positive discipline models giving empathy and positive intent to others. It gives children examples of how to best work through conflicts. To read more about positive discipline, read https://parentingbydrrene.com/?s=steps. You can also listen to our online audio workshops at http://parentingplaygroups.com/MemberResources/index.php/welcome/.