Sometimes I feel my most important job as a parent is to make sure that, while trying to kill each other, no one around here actually gets hurt.
A moment ago one went flying out of the other one’s bedroom, and then a door slammed with an amount of force that, I’ve learnt from experience, can only be evoked when a little sister tries to sneak out with something illicitly “borrowed” from the bigger one.
In sibling fight language, big, exaggerated punctuation-mark noises such as doors slamming and object-throwing means: “Mum, come. She’s. In. My. Room”.
Should I stay or go? Intervene, throw around some cross adult words such as “unacceptable”, “intolerable” or “grounded” and risk getting caught in the crossfire? Or let them battle it out until someone loses some skin?
Two minutes after pulling each other’s hair out, they’ll be making houses together on Minecraft. But it will take me hours to recover from the guilt of the scary-mum scream and the words: “Wait until your father gets home”. Such empty threats might have stopped us as kids but they are just embarrassing now.
Some experts say it’s natural for siblings to want to whack each other and in doing so they learn how to manage conflict and some of the more uncomfortable feelings on the emotional spectrum, like anger and frustration.
Others believe sibling rivalry, particularly bullying, can cause life-long psychological issues, including depression and low self-esteem. But most agree it is normal, not as in OK normal, but in the sense that it happens in most households.
While that is true, it nonetheless drives us parents crazy; we might have invented satellite navigation and phones that do everything for us, but not one of us has worked out a way to stop our kids from hurting each other.
The fact that so many of us grew up giving our siblings Chinese burns and now we’re the best of friends, doesn’t help. Often it was the sibling we butted heads against the most that we are, in adulthood, the closest to. But should the guilt of tickling a little sister until she can’t breathe be wiped away by excuses – it was familial bonding, or a primal way of toughening up the younger ones so they could deal with the toughies on the corner? Is that good enough?
Actually, I admit, it did sometimes feel good, as a five-year-old, to be able to dole out a subtle punch when someone lost my best Fanta yo-yo or took my last bit of Easter egg from the fridge.
My little brother once gave me a blood nose. Unfortunately it didn’t last long enough for the moment of triumph I was hoping for, which involved my parents coming home, seeing my face awash with blood and deciding on the spot to send the perpetrator to an orphanage. The blood dried up and I was labelled a dibby dobber. But I still do wonder where they were, those parents of ours. Why weren’t they home to see the carnage?
It all rings true, in a way, with Freud’s theory about sibling violence being used as a way of eradicating our competitors in the battle for parental love.
Yet I’m not so sure parental love is the motivating factor these days. It would only be an issue around here if we were tablet-shaped and our batteries were charged to capacity.
I think I’ll just leave them to it.
