Why do sisters argue

If you always intervene, you risk creating other problems. The kids may start expecting your help and wait for you to come to the rescue rather than learning to work out the problems on their own. There's also the risk that you — inadvertently — make it appear to one child that another is always being "protected," which could foster even more resentment. By the same token, rescued kids may feel that they can get away with more because they're always being "saved" by a parent.

If you're concerned by the language used or name-calling, it's appropriate to "coach" kids through what they're feeling by using appropriate words. This is different from intervening or stepping in and separating the kids. Even then, encourage them to resolve the crisis themselves. If you do step in, try to resolve problems with your kids, not for them. Remember, as kids cope with disputes, they also learn important skills that will serve them for life — like how to value another person's perspective, how to compromise and negotiate, and how to control aggressive impulses.

Keep in mind that sometimes kids fight to get a parent's attention. In that case, consider taking a time-out of your own. When you leave, the incentive for fighting is gone. Also, when your own fuse is getting short, consider handing the reins over to the other parent, whose patience may be greater at that moment. In a small percentage of families, the conflict between brothers and sisters is so severe that it disrupts daily functioning, or particularly affects kids emotionally or psychologically.

In those cases, it's wise to get help from a mental health professional. Seek help for sibling conflict if it:. If you have questions about your kids' fighting, talk with your doctor, who can help you determine whether your family might benefit from professional help and refer you to local behavioral health resources. Larger text size Large text size Regular text size. About Sibling Rivalry While many kids are lucky enough to become the best of friends with their siblings, it's common for brothers and sisters to fight.

Why Kids Fight Many different things can cause siblings to fight. These include: Evolving needs. It's natural for kids' changing needs, anxieties, and identities to affect how they relate to one another. For example, toddlers are naturally protective of their toys and belongings, and are learning to assert their will, which they'll do at every turn. So if a baby brother or sister picks up the toddler's toy, the older child may react aggressively. School-age kids often have a strong concept of fairness and equality, so might not understand why siblings of other ages are treated differently or feel like one child gets preferential treatment.

Teenagers, on the other hand, are developing a sense of individuality and independence, and might resent helping with household responsibilities, taking care of younger siblings, or even having to spend time together. All of these differences can influence the way kids fight with one another. Individual temperaments. ET on January 24, The war between brothers and sisters is eternal, each generation renewing the hostilities that have defined sibling relations since humanity began.

Although it seems as if my children never give it a rest, in fact they fight far less than the average. Younger children fight even more —six times each hour. This means they have a fight—a real fight, not just cross words—every 10 minutes. Sibling rivalry is an evolutionary imperative, an innate impulse. By six months , infants get upset when their mother pays attention to a baby doll.

By 16 months , they know what bothers their siblings and will annoy them on purpose. For many of us, our relationships with our siblings are the most profound relationships in our lives, more important and influential than the ones we have with our parents.

Sibling conflict is not unique to humans, and humans are nowhere near as bad as some other animals are. Many animal siblings actually kill each other, often while the parents look on blithely.

Black eagles are particularly vicious. There was, by the way, more than enough food for both. They play an in utero version of the Hunger Games, using their nascent teeth to chomp up all the sibling embryos they can.

How did researchers figure this out? A biologist dissecting a pregnant shark was bitten by an embryo, still swimming around in the uterus, still looking for siblings to eat.

Pigs are vicious, too, born with teeth that are angled to gash littermates while they nurse. Sibling rivalry is common to all living things, even plants, which will chemically poison competing offspring to divert resources to themselves.

Even bacteria fight with their bacterial siblings, resorting, like sharks, to cannibalism and fratricide. Human siblings rarely resort to murder, and even more rarely to cannibalism, but they certainly scrap.

For most of history, however, sibling conflict was subject to little examination and even less concern. Both myth and history are full of examples, with the Bible alone providing a good half-dozen case studies. Sibling conflict shows up in about 20 of the 50 chapters in Genesis. The very first homicide occurs between the very first brothers, Cain and Abel. Esau and Jacob, like sand tiger sharks, begin fighting while still in the womb. Sibling rivalry occurs in a lot of religious traditions and ancient mythologies.

In the Hindu epic the Mahabharata, Arjuna kills his brother Karna, and in the Norse sagas, brothers are forever fighting and killing one another off. Romulus whacks Remus after they bicker over a wall. Zeus gets along with his siblings a bit better, marrying two of them gross and teaming up with the rest to fight his father in the War of the Titans. Once the war is over, however, the siblings go back to intra-familial turf wars and squabbling.

Read: Sibling rivalries, a history. In the Bible, many of the fights are over parental affection, which is what psychology traditionally blamed for sibling rivalry, when it considered the topic at all.

You teach them how to handle disagreements and guide them towards skills for managing angry feelings, negotiating and playing fair. It can help to think ahead about how to handle fights in tricky situations. Turning around to talk to children or separate them takes your attention off the road. With your help, children can learn to work out disagreements by themselves, without fighting. This can help your children get along better and deal positively with conflicts with other children.

Sometimes disagreements about a screen or a favourite toy seem to turn into name-calling and arguing straight away. If this sounds like your situation, you might want to start the reminders and coaching as soon as the screen is turned on or the toy comes out. Skip to content Skip to navigation. You can foster these feelings by: spending special time with each child regularly giving plenty of hugs and smiles to everyone trying not to compare children with each other.

Here are some tips for making rules work : Involve children in setting up rules. Put a copy of your house rules on the fridge or somewhere everyone can see them. Follow through every time children bend or break the rules. Then give another chance. If children still break the rules, use an agreed consequence. A sample routine might look like this: Television: Samantha chooses the program from 6. Jake chooses from 7. Games: Jake chooses on Saturdays, Samantha chooses on Sundays.

Bathroom: Jake uses the bathroom first in the morning, then Samantha.