How to encourage sibling play

A few things that have worked in our home

Here’s the thing: writing about parenting week in and week out — even going so far as to occasionally give advice! — is a daunting undertaking. Our kids are just 9, 6, and 3, very much works in progress. Their parents, it should go without saying, are works in progress, too.

And yet, if John and I were to wait until we’ve seen how everything has “turned out” (when would that be, exactly?) to share notes from our family files — what’s working, what’s not — we’d likely be too far removed to offer anything helpful. We wouldn’t remember exactly how it was. The memories would be fuzzy, the achingly-specific details eclipsed into broad impressions, the rose-colored glasses doing what they do best.

And so here I am, reporting from the messy middle on a topic that we have certainly not mastered as a family: harmonious sibling relationships. I wanted to chat about this now, as summer begins, because I think siblings fighting is a major reason that parents turn to screens. I know it is for us! On a day my kids just can’t seem to keep their paws off each other (metaphorically or literally), it’s awfully tempting to turn on a show to give them a chance to reset… and to give the parents a break, too.

Sometimes a show can be a helpful reset. But I want us to have other tools in our toolbox to help our children enjoy playing with each other, especially when school’s out for the summer and they can be together more often.

Even with the best tools, will fights in our homes drop to zero? No, but that’s not really the goal: kids need to practice getting along with others (and making repairs when they fail), and home is the most available training ground. As Jon Haidt says in The Anxious Generation, “It is in unsupervised, child-led play where children best learn to tolerate bruises, handle their emotions, read other children’s emotions, take turns, resolve conflicts, and play fair.” And this will result in fights: studies have shown that siblings between the ages of three and seven clash 3.5 times per hour, on average. Some of those are brief clashes, others are longer, but it adds up to ten minutes of every hour spent arguing.¹

Over the years John and I have collected several strategies for keeping fighting to a reasonable level (and, even better, encouraging harmonious play) in our home. Some we cribbed from our parents, others we learned from experts, and some were on-the-fly discoveries we stumbled upon in a moment of need. I’m passing them along in the hopes that one or two might help in your moments of need. Let’s get into it!