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Solve Sibling Rivalry For GOOD · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  How are we supposed to deal with sibling conflict? Sibling rivalry can hurt the family culture of so many amazing families that otherwise would be thriving. Your kids are bickering all the time. They seem to be competing with each other constantly. What's really at the root of this? And is there a way to deal with this that can transform your entire family culture?
• 0:20
  I believe there is. I think we can get straight to the root of what is causing so much of this dysfunction. And there's something that may surprise you in terms of how we are seeing so many large families function in a very different way because they see family differently. But before we go there, I want to look at what is the absolute best thinking situation?
• 0:38
  We're
• 1:03
  How is this currently being framed in our culture? How do we overcome sibling rivalry in the modern Western family context? So much of why kids are not nice to siblings actually comes from the fact that they're seeing their sibling as a threat. And the honest thing is our kids kind of are threats to our other kids, right? At the core, kids are oriented by attachment. They need attachment to us, their parent, to survive. It's literally how they get food, shelter, and water.
• 1:31
  And so kids are always paying attention to what is maximizing connection, what is threatening. And their sibling, in some ways, actually does threaten that, right? It's like another person who needs all that stuff from us. Now, if you also have a sibling who is, I don't know, particularly good.
• 1:47
  good at all the things and they're the star athlete or going back to the kids in our family who are different from us. If you have a kid who's very similar to, you know, I skied at college and my kids is this amazing skier, right? That might be triggering to my older kid who let's say really likes art and likes to read when me and my partner aren't really into that because my kids kind of like, wow, this kid is an extra threat. So I think that's important to think about first.
• 2:12
  One-on-one time with your kid without your phone. It's literally the most important parenting strategy there is for anything. Any behavioral problems, the first intervention after understanding should be, can I just spend one-on-one time with my kid without our phones? And that is it. It's like connection capital building on steroids. And it helps the kid feel more secure in your connection, which helps them act out less. So that's what I would do. And then I would actually level with our kids.
• 2:40
  Too often we don't say to our kids, there's something about your sister it's really hard to get along with. Doesn't mean you're throwing her under the bus. Like what is it? And if you know, it's okay to say it. Hey, I'm just thinking it could be kind of annoying to have a sister who's always making the soccer team and is like always out with her friends and oh, that could be kind of hard.
• 2:59
  We're often afraid to say that because we often say the opposite. Why can't you just be nice to your sister? In which case we just create more of a binary. You're the bad kid and your sister's the good kid. So a way to reverse that, spending more time and actually just kind of normalizing, right? And that actually, again, removes the aloneness in whatever your kid was struggling with, which is often the foundation for so much positive change.
• 3:23
  All right, Dr. Becky's basic analysis is that rivalry is natural because siblings are competing for scarce resources. She talks about water, shelter, but especially parental attention. And that if you are seeing your kids fighting over scarce attention, the first thing is to understand that
• 3:44
  It is very scarce what they're fighting over and rivalry does make sense. And so we can't really solve the problem. What we can do is empathize with our kids. We can spend more one-on-one time with them. We can talk to them about the difficulty they may be having with a particularly annoying sibling. Okay.
• 4:01
  So I want to help you guys understand that part of what she's saying here is the root of the problem. She's assuming that what we are is we're individuals fighting over scarce resources. And that is the framing of the modern Western family. We are not a team. We don't work together. We're not assets to each other. We're actually liabilities. That's the real reality. We are actually threatened to each other.
• 4:26
  having a sibling in this context means that I'm going to get less of what I really need and that I need to compete with you. And so if you are involved in a sport that dad or mom was involved in, and so they kind of relate to you, then maybe I'm going to be on the outs of that. So,
• 4:41
  That is really at the root of what is so wrong with the way that current families are structured. There's a structural problem that Dr. Becky is assuming that the family is a springboard for individual success and that there is scarce resources. And I think the best way to deal with this problem, if that's the reality of it, is to have only one child, right? Have a smaller family. Have two at the most.
• 5:05
  Do not have two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight kids if what you're building is just a springboard for individual success because you're just going to take the same pie and just have to slice it up into smaller and smaller and smaller pieces. And the sibling rivalry is just going to become more and more a part of the family culture. Now, what we want to do is take a big step back.
• 5:25
  And say, look, there's another way to frame the family. The family is a team. And one of the things that you notice, and you see this in a lot of contexts, I'll give you a few examples, of how this completely transforms the way everyone sees each other. So you'll notice that in a lot of countries, if there's a lot of internal squabbling and all of a sudden the country is attacked.
• 5:47
  Uh, everyone suddenly unifies. Why? Well, we no longer are primarily aiming at each other and seeing each other as the, as the obstacle to the scarce resources. We're seeing this outward enemy coming at us and we all of a sudden transform our thinking from thinking about you as a rival to you as an ally. Yeah.
• 6:07
  And the question is, how do you make that move happen in your family? How do you transform the way that your children see each other from being rivals to being allies? And a lot of this comes down to whether or not you do see that external threat. I remember in the 80s, I'd watch sitcoms and basically every single one of these family sitcoms that I watched would have an episode where the siblings would be constantly bickering, lots of rivalry, very little connection between siblings until the younger sibling gets bullied.
• 6:36
  And then there was always the episode where the older sibling would suddenly go from, oh, my annoying little brother, little sister to going to war on behalf of their younger sibling. And then you have this wonderful moment at the end of the episode where they would come together and realize maybe for the first time, wow, we really need each other.
• 6:54
  In other words, this is a natural part of what it means to be part of a team. Of course, this happens constantly on sports teams, right? Sports teams that are constantly bickering with each other are never going to succeed. And so a good coach is going to constantly refocus everyone's energy on how do we really help each other play our part better and better. And you've ever, if you've ever been a part of a sports team that's gone through this transformation, where all of a sudden you're functioning like one unit, some of the deepest relationships you'll ever have in your life are,
• 7:23
  are with teammates where they're very different than you. In any other context, you probably wouldn't be friends, but because you're allies on this team, you really value each other. And so what has happened to the family, you guys, is for thousands of years, the family was seen as a team. It was our family against so many forces out there that are constantly working to destroy the family.
• 7:47
  And our family constantly working together, try to expand the family's resources to try to succeed as a family team. And what happened in the last couple of hundred years is we started to rethink about the family, not as a team, but as a springboard for individual success. And this is why birth rates are plummeting. This is why sibling rivalry is almost impossible to overcome without just enormous amounts of attention and trying to overcome the scarcity by just paying the price more and more as the parents,
• 8:17
  that, okay, yeah, I know it's annoying. I know that your sibling is not really on your team. They're not really an ally. They are a rival. They are taking away from you. They are a threat, but we're going to try to make up for that with just more time with you. That is just always going to be a difficult strategy. It's always going to result in a certain amount of failure. The real strategy is to become a team.
• 8:40
  And so what I want to talk to you guys about is, is how do you go through this mindset shift? And one of the elements of that, where it really starts is with your marriage. Unfortunately, one of the things that we've done, we've not only talked about siblings as being fighting over scarce resources, but many of our marriages function in the same way. So much of marriage advice I see today is about how do you negotiate with your spouse over the scarce amount of resources? Because you're both trying to build out your individual lives.
• 9:05
  you know, independently from each other and independently from the family. And so what you're trying to do is constantly figure out, okay, how do we fight over? How do we negotiate over if you're really good at negotiating and you're a very kind and friendly person that maybe we can survive this endless negotiation where my spouse is also a threat to my individual life? Oh, I wish we could move to this city. It'd be better for my career, but it's better for you to stay here. Again, all of these things are so unfortunate.
• 9:31
  to not think about the family as a team. So it starts with your marriage. Do you have the kind of marriage where you see your spouse as an ally because you're both on the same team? Instead of switching teams and saying, I'm on Team Jeremy and I'm all about me. And so I'm going to negotiate against you, my wife. She's on Team April. No, what about Team Prior?
• 9:49
  What about that? What if I would be willing to sacrifice as much as possible for team prior to succeed and my wife is doing the same? What it means to lead is to say, I sacrifice first and sacrifice most. And so I want my wife to see, no, I am not doing this to build some kind of individual identity. I'm doing this because I really believe in our team. I'm first and foremost for our family team. And so if your marriage is one in which you're demonstrating that, are you modeling that?
• 10:16
  for the kids? Or are you modeling an endless negotiation where you are a threat to each other's individual goals and individual happiness? So you want to start with your marriage. The second thing after your marriage begins to function more like a team is you want to be finding arenas where you can begin to experience the strength or the teamness of your entire family. And so we're constantly looking for those kinds of arenas as a team. I'm going to give you guys a few examples of that in a minute.
• 10:43
  But also you need to be on mission as a family. You need to have a mission worthy of the sacrifice and attention of every teammate. And so part of what we're looking for are these arenas in the family itself. Like how are we doing this inside the home? How are we doing this in other arenas like sports or in other places where we're going? But also missionally, like how are we reaching out and doing good things in the world and
• 11:08
  Again, not as individuals, but as a team together. Okay, so here are some tools that I think are really, really useful. A really simple one is to begin to dial down individual language in favor of team language. We language. Talk about us. Stop talking about me and my needs. And so let's talk about us and what we're trying to do as a family. Talk about even calling yourself a team.
• 11:32
  Talking about the different people on the team, the husband, the wife, the brothers and sisters, hey, we're all members of a team. We're all working together towards that. So talking like a team, using a lot of that language can really help just change the mentality of what you're building. Another element is to look for every arena that currently is being individualized and...
• 11:50
  And we are obsessed with individual elements in any kind of individual arena. We're just like, whether it's music or sports or school or ministry or church or anything like that, it's designed to break the family into its individual pieces and then create these perfect little environments where you're around other peers, but never around your siblings. Yeah.
• 12:09
  Your siblings are you're never experiencing your sibling as an actual ally. And so we need to find these arenas. And so we were constantly looking for these things as a family. I did a whole podcast on a dad who created a whole kickball league so that all of his kids would be working together on the same team. They were all in different sports. You can check out that podcast. It was so helpful to see. I've seen lots of families now actually adopt these kinds of family team sports.
• 12:33
  We have some friends who are creating a soccer league that's doing something similar. We did this with martial arts. It was one place where we could all be trained together. We could all be rooting for each other. We've done this with racket sports like tennis and pickleball. And so we're constantly looking for these sports where we can be experiencing this together and putting our kids on a similar team and having them compete together.
• 12:54
  In that way, instead of competing against each other, see each other as allies and experience the strength of having a sibling who really you're rooting for and that you're a part of what their success is a part of your success. If you've ever experienced that, that's something good. And then defining these hard, difficult mission experiences, whether it's like building a house together in Mexico. We did a lot of international missions as a family together.
• 13:17
  And there was a constant training and conversation that happened. And our kids just saw that, wow, instead of being with their friends and being around peers all the time and being in an environment in which their little siblings were, you know, some kind of annoyance, they actually experienced what it was like to be in a family where as they were going out and having new experiences, doing difficult things, seeing successes, experiencing what it's like to see the kingdom of God expand as a result of us being on a
• 13:47
  see that transformation. So it's really important to understand that rivalry, we think it's natural because siblings are constantly taking away parental attention from each other, but we need to really reverse this whole way of thinking. Instead of thinking that we are somehow needing to distract our kids from this threat, this sort of scarcity mindset.
• 14:05
  We need to have a team mindset. Those are radically different ideas. And if you want to start to figure out how to transform your family more into a team, we've created a quick five-day course for you at familyteams.com slash transform. So you could check that out because there is a process of really thinking differently about your family and what your family is that begins to create this whole different culture that we're describing. So check that out over at familyteams.com slash transform.
• 14:30
  And we're going to keep like working through a lot of these traditionally difficult areas of family life and really showing how becoming a family team can heal, not just at the surface level, but at the root of what is wrong with the modern family.