Siblings and the Fights That Aren’t Fair

By a quarter to eight on a Saturday, the eight-year-old has, for the third time this morning, taken the small blue car the four-year-old was playing with, held it above her head, and watched her brother dissolve into the kind of crying that goes on long past the original injury. The parent, who has been making toast and has not seen the first move, hears only the second half: the wailing, the older child’s aggrieved voice insisting it was her car first, the smaller child running across the kitchen with his face contorted the way four-year-olds’ faces go when the universe has been unjust.

The parent has, by now, broken up the same fight more times than she can count. She has tried the praise, the consequence, the family meeting, the everyone-says-sorry. By Saturday lunchtime, she is in the loo with the door locked, wondering whether it is normal to feel so much for one’s children and so little patience for the noise they make at each other.

It is. In our work, parents arrive in this kitchen often. The sibling fight is the most reliably exhausting feature of family life, and the parent who has decided, by Wednesday, that she is being asked to referee a war she did not declare is not failing. She has noticed something true.