Sibling harmony (at least for a day)

It’s probably bad luck for me to even articulate this thought, let alone commit it to my blog, but my kids seem to be getting along better this week than they did in all the weeks since school let out. And as any parent knows, that makes life a lot easier. Exponentially easier, one might even say, especially during summer vacation.

In general, Tim and Holly do get along reasonably well compared to many siblings. At least some of the time, they treat each other with one or more of the following characteristics: interest, appreciation, respect, admiration. Other times not. I realize that having children four years apart in age doesn’t necessarily make things easier, although there have been times that it did. As I’ve often said, it’s my experience that children who are that far apart in age as well as being different genders don’t compete over a lot of things because their interests and abilities are so different.

On the other hand, it seems that those differences in their interests and abilities are what are sabotaging me this summer. At seven and eleven years of age, there just isn’t a whole lot they like to do together. Last week the mother of one of Holly’s newest friends said to me, “My two girls are 22 months apart. Their whole life is a nonstop playdate.” It’s a lot different from that at our house.

Yesterday was a better day than the two or three dozen that preceded it. I told the kids we were going to spend the afternoon at the pond, just the three of us. Earlier in the week I let each of them bring a friend along for a swim. It seemed like a good idea; I thought if each had someone to play with, everyone would be happy. But Holly seems to be suffering more than usual this summer from the left-in-the-dust sense that her older sibling is having all the fun and she’s hanging on by her fingernails to keep up. And in this case it didn’t help one bit that her friend seemed more interested in what Tim and his friend were doing in the water than what Holly wanted to do. I’d long anticipated that this dynamic would eventually occur, but I didn’t expect it so soon.

So yesterday no one brought a friend; it was just us three, and for two hours the kids had fun together. They played, they swam, they dived, they raced. They just enjoyed each other’s company.

Last week I heard an interview on Talk of the Nation with Po Bronson, author of NurtureShock. Bronson cited a statistic that siblings ten years old and under typically argue for ten minutes out of every hour they spend together. Then he said that the best thing parents can do to facilitate sibling relationships is to “stop trying to resolve the conflicts that do emerge and teach kids the skills of initiating play together in a constructive way. [Then] they tend to do less fighting simply because they play better in the first place.”

I found this simple notion thought-provoking. Rather than worrying about the bickering, foster opportunities for them to have fun together. The more they appreciate each other as someone whom it’s fun to be with, the more they will instinctively avoid gratuitious disagreements.

It certainly makes sense. When I was growing up, my family went on long trips together every summer. For the most part, my sisters and I got along better on those trips than we did during the school year. As Bronson points out, in order to have fun, we had to get along; we didn’t have access to any other kids while we were traveling, whereas at home during the school year we could rely on our friends for entertainment and emotional sustenance.

It also reminded me of something a friend with two daughters older than my kids once said. She confessed that if a friend of one of her daughters calls with a last-minute invitation, sometimes if her girls are having fun together she won’t even pass on the invitation. It’s just too valuable to her to see her daughters enjoying each other’s company, so she takes every opportunity to foster those qualities, even if it means decreasing their opportunities to socialize with friends.

So while I watched my kids having fun at the pond yesterday, I wondered what it was that was working so well. Water is always a good setting, especially on a hot day, for one thing. But it was also the lack of distractions and the sense of ease to the afternoon. They had no place else to be and no one else to play with. They had each other and they were both having a good time. As Po Bronson said, it’s not everything, but it bodes well, if only I can make it happen more often as the summer proceeds.