Realistic Sibling Relationships: Setting Healthy Expectations for Siblings

I don’t think a week goes by that I don’t get a question from a parent asking about how to manage siblings issues in their home! As the oldest of 3, I can tell you that sibling relationships can be great, but they can also be tricky! What I often encourage parents to do is to be realistic and honest about the nature of kids getting along with each other! In this video, I’ll share 3 ways that you can set healthy expectations for your children to develop healthy siblings relationships!

Just want to read the post instead of watch the video? Check out the transcript below.

In today’s video we’re going to talk about a topic that I get questions about constantly: sibling relationships. Let me share with you a few tips on how you can set realistic expectations for your siblings and their relationships.

Of all the topics that I get asked about as a parent coach, one that comes up time and time again is how to create healthy sibling relationships. So, I really want to get into three ways that you can really understand what it means have a healthy relationship between your siblings.

Let Them Establish Their Own Identity

The first way is to really help them establish their own identity. The important piece of that is that when each sibling feels like they are a separate person, and a separate entity from their siblings and their family unit, they actually have more empathy for their sibling’s differences and their sibling’s different personalities. When we encourage siblings to always hangout, we encourage siblings to always do things together, we don’t help them establish strengths and weaknesses of their own identity. Which means they don’t have any space to understand or empathize with their sibling’s strength and weaknesses. It’s really going to be important that no matter what’s going on in their relationship, that you really help each of your children to establish who they: are good and bad; pros and cons; strength and weaknesses. That way as they begin to identify their own, they can have that empathy and that space to see that their siblings also are different.

Having their own identity helps your children understand who they are and allows space for them to accept who their siblings are

Don’t Referee Sibling Disagreements

The second tip – and it’s really important but I also know that it’s real difficult to do when you see your siblings engage in conflicts – is to never referee. The best thing that you can do when siblings begin to have conflicts or disagreements is to set some boundaries. You can let them know that there’s no fighting or there’s no name-calling. However, you don’t want to be the referee. You want to give them tools so that way they can figure it on their own. Encourage them to sit and talk to each other. Encourage them to be honest about what they need and how to tell their sibling what they want. You want to encourage them to go back and try to figure out on their own. You can even let them know that if they need help, you’ll be there to help. But you want to give them some time to really go back and think how can I actually deal with this conflict or this disagreement with my sibling.

Let your children figure out how to talk to each other – you can be there as support – but encourage them to talk it through.

Help Them Understand The Fluidity of Human Relationships

The third tip – and it’s one that goes in line with not refereeing as well as helping your siblings to really find their own unique identities – is to help your chidlren really understand that there are ups and downs in every relationship. You can teach them that just because siblings are a family unit, it doesn’t mean they always have to like each other. I think sometimes we forget that we’re not talking to our siblings or that our children are not going to have the same experiences as we had. We really want them to get along and we really want them to understand that they’re family and they have to be together. But really giving them a healthy space to say it’s okay for you not like your sibling sometimes, or that it’s okay not to want to be around them sometimes, that’s a healthy part of every relationship. The more we give our kids that space to say I have feelings; I don’t always want to go with my sibling or I’ll always want to be with my sibling. The more we give them space to do that, the more likely they’ll want to come together, hang out with their sibling for a while and have their own space. And like I said, I think that goes in line with the first two tips which were that siblings have their own identity and you want to help facilitate that as well as not refereeing. The more you can give siblings really healthy understandings of what it looks like to have a relationship with another human being, the more likely they’ll begin to incorporate those tools and those skills in their relationship with their sibling.

Give your children space to understand the ups and downs of being in a relationship with another human – they’re not always going to want to hang out with one another!

Let’s do a quick recap:

  1. Help and acknowledge each child’s separate identity. That allows them to be more empathetic to you and your separate identity as well as their siblings.
  2. Never referee a sibling conflict. You definitely want to get into if there are some physical things going on, but if they’re just having a verbal sparring or they are not really getting along, really encourage that they go back and help together try to figure it out. And if they need, help then they can coming get you.
  3. Help your children identify that there is a healthy kind of fluctuation, an up and down flow of every single human relationship and that just because they are siblings, it doesn’t mean they have to always like each other.

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