Brothers and sisters, however, aren’t going anywhere you can argue and brawl all you want, but you’re still going to wind up in the same shared bedroom at the end of the day. Indeed, it’s a very good thing.Ĭonflicts develop in the real world all the time, but try engaging in longterm unresolved warfare with your friends in school and you’ll soon find yourself alone on the playground. Such endless clashing ought to be a highly non-adaptive thing, but the fact that in the long arc of human history it hasn’t been selected against means that it isn’t. A cross word, a mean-spirited joke, an encroachment across the invisible line that separates your place from your big sister’s place at the dinner table can all be cues for the hostile shelling to begin. “It’s a very important part of the development of personal identity-the idea that ‘What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is yours.'”īut property is by no means the only casus belli. “We found that 95% of younger siblings and 93% of older siblings said the taking of property was a major problem in their relationships,” psychologist Catherine Salmon of the University of Redlands told me for my 2011 book The Sibling Effect. Most of those fights involve property-the familial felony of playing with, touching or even looking at someone else’s stuff. Factor in the smaller-bore stuff and siblings are, in effect, constantly at war.
It meant at least three sequential hostile exchanges-provocation, reaction, and response to the reaction. And for the purposes of the studies, a conflict was not defined as a single shove or taunt or other shot across the sibling bow.
In the three to seven age group it gets better-but only a little-with an average of 2.5 conflicts in a 45-minute play session, or 3.5 per hour. One study from the University of Toronto found that in the two to four age group, siblings engage in an average of 6.3 fights per hour-or one every 9.5 minutes. Parents aren’t exaggerating when they say that their children seem constantly to be fighting.
Sibling socialization starts early-and it has its most powerful expression in what can often be the free fire zone of the playroom. Our sibs are the only people we’ll ever know who are with us through the entire ride. Our parents leave us too early, our spouses and children come along too late. In the process, we form a connection with our brothers and sisters that we’ll never have with anyone else. We learn about selfishness and selflessness, mentoring and listening-all of the skills we start life lacking and all of which we’d jolly well better learn if we’re going to function in the larger world outside the home.
Our brothers and sisters teach us about comradeship and combat, loyalty and rivalry, when to stand up for ourselves and when to stand down, how to share confidences and the wages of breaking them. The sibling bond, for all of us, is nothing short of a full-time, total-immersion dress rehearsal for life. The fraternal dynamic at play in that chance second informed and improved not just the relationship we shared with each other, but the ones we would share with anyone else later in life when a similar kind of compassionate mind-reading would be a handy thing to have. The one thing we didn’t say in that moment-but said with real words, many times in the decades that followed-was how bloody wonderful the entire exchange was, how in a fleeting, silent instant, we had shared understanding, empathy, contrition, forgiveness, a sense of proportion and a strange, intimate peek inside each other’s minds. I missed my shot and was hoping you didn’t notice. In the span of a second, a wordless conversation played out. At one point when Bruce was about to begin his turn, I turned away, then turned back, caught his eye and immediately saw guilt there. Bruce and I were in our home, playing a game of our own devising that involved volleying the tennis ball off our basement wall. The ball bounced many years ago, around the time I was in fourth grade and my youngest brother, Bruce, was in second. It was a single bounce of a tennis ball that made me a better sibling-and, as it turned out, a better person too.