Hellobee

Charlie and Olive have been getting closer lately, and I often wonder: is sibling closeness a matter of nature or nurture?

Charlie’s kindergarten graduation day. He was so proud of Olive and introduced her to everyone as his little sister.

I’ve noticed that when things are going well, parents tend to take credit (“it’s my parenting!”). I’m certainly no different on that front: I’m happy to take full credit for all kinds of stuff that I’m sure were heavily impacted by nature (like the kids sleeping through the night). Sometimes I’m not sure how much of an impact our parenting/nurturing has on our kids’ behavior.

All that said, I can say with 100% confidence that while sibling closeness may be tough to nurture, it’s pretty easy to crush and destroy. There are a few really reliable ways to destroy sibling closeness, including:

• Creating a culture of competition between the kids
• Playing favorites between the kids
• Being unfair or inconsistent in how you treat the kids
• Not giving the kids enough space to themselves

Can you nurture sibling closeness? I don’t know – but here are some ways you can avoid destroying it!

1. The importance of getting the kids to have fun together

Our kids both love MagnaTiles and would fight endlessly over who got to build with our limited number of MagnaTiles. For months, we focused on trying to get them to share. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t, and often building sessions ended in tears.

Finally we broke down, and bought some more MagnaTiles. I wasn’t surprised that the fighting stopped almost immediately, but I was surprised that they soon started building side-by-side for hours. They even started to build structures together, something that they hadn’t been able to manage when they were bickering constantly over who got to use the limited MagnaTiles.

Now they build almost everything together, and share incredibly well – even when we have a limited number of MagnaTiles or blocks available. The experience taught us a lesson in sequencing. My plan had been to teach them to share, at which point they could be trusted to play together. But that turned out to be backwards thinking: the key turned out to be getting them to play together, which taught them to share.

All that said, I wondered if this whole experience had really taught them anything. They had been fighting over toys, so we bought them more. A lot of problems can be solved with a little money! I got to thinking about the general principle, and we tried to apply it to a new situation.

2. The importance of getting the kids to have fun together, part 2

The kids really started getting into board games, which are basically a way to pit your children against each other in bloody battle. I remember growing up we would play these epic games of Monopoly as a family, and they would usually end in tears and frustration. Come to think of it, we stopped playing Monopoly after a while and started playing less competitive games like Parcheesi and Life.

The kids loved boards games from the start, especially Candyland. But problems started emerging when they realized that only one person could win each game. It was just like with the MagnaTiles: the bickering started to increase in frequency, and we had to supervise the games more closely. When one kid would win, the other kid would show signs of being a sore loser.

My natural inclination was to teach the kids how to be a gracious loser, and to experience winning so that they enjoyed playing the game. But the earlier experience got me thinking: maybe we should just focus on getting them enjoying the game itself first. So we made two small changes:

• We keep playing after the first player wins. So after Olive beats us at Candyland (how does she keep winning??), we then make sure that everyone else keeps drawing cards until they cross the finish line. It makes it a lot easier for the kids to be a gracious loser when they know they can still cross the finish line.
• We speed things up a bit after the first player wins. So for Candyland, we just ignore the cards that send you back to the Gumdrop Mountains and other locations.

I noticed two immediate results of these changes: the games became a lot more fun for the kids. And once again, now that they weren’t blatantly competing… they became much more generous towards each other. At first, we always had to let everyone finish and cross the finish line. But now sometimes we don’t even bother having everyone cross the finish line – and that’s ok with the kids! The kids still have fun, and there are no sore losers.

The key has been to focus on the fun first, and the sharing/graciousness naturally follows later. Over time, we plan to completely phase out the “everyone crosses the finish line” crutch and just stop playing after the first person wins.

In the meantime, the kids are begging to play board games every day after school gets out. The other day they even played Zingo by themselves for an hour or so. It was heaven for us as parents: they were amusing each other (so we didn’t have to), and they were growing closer too.

Sharing is caring

3. The importance of creating niches

One of my favorite books (Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives) talks about the importance of allowing kids to get niches. Then they don’t have to compete as much, because they each have their own niche.

My second favorite example of this is Ralph Nader and his siblings:

One instructive example of sibling specialization comes from the family of Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate and several-time candidate for president of the United States. When Nader and his three older siblings were adolescents, they divided the world into four equal parts. Each sibling took one quarter of the world, and they subsequently specialized in the history, culture, and languages of his or her own particular portion of the globe. As part of this sibling bargain, Ralph Nader learned three different languages (Chinese, Russian, and Arabic) that were associated with his chosen geographic domain.

Source: Born to Rebel

My favorite example of this though is Richard Feynman, the Nobel-winning physicist and his sister, Joan. As kids, Richard introduced her to the beauty of auroras and she was inspired to become a physicist as well. Over time, she came to specialize in the physics of auroras:

[Joan Feynman’s] pioneering work on these processes led to an understanding of the mechanism responsible for auroras. She found this work wonderful, and her immediate reaction was to tell her brother, who’d first introduced her to these beautiful phenomena all those years before.

But then a second thought crossed her mind. “Richard is pretty smart, and if I tell him about an interesting problem, he’ll find the answer before I do and take all the fun out of it for me.” So Joan decided to strike a deal with him. “I said, Look, I don’t want us to compete, so let’s divide up physics between us. I’ll take auroras and you take the rest of the Universe. And he said OK!” …

In the early 1980s, Joan wasn’t the only Feynman seduced by solar-terrestrial relations. Her brother Richard had kept his original promise to her not to work on auroras. Despite an impressive polymath career in which he applied his genius to a spectacular spectrum of problem-solving across the fields of maths, physics, chemistry, and biology, he had never turned his attention to Joan’s chosen field.

But then he traveled to Alaska, an important centre for aurora studies. On a tour of the facility, the head of the lab pointed out many of the interesting geophysical phenomena that were yet to be explained. “Would you be interested in working on it?” he enquired. Richard responded that he would, but added that he’d have to ask his sister’s permission. Joan remembers that he came back and told her the story. “I’m sorry Richard,” she replied, “but I’m not giving you permission.” Richard duly reported back that his sister had refused to allow him to study auroras!

Source: A Passion For Science: Tales of Discovery and Invention.

I love this! Richard and Joan were close until his death, and if I had to guess, that might not have happened as naturally if he had gone into her niche.

4. Pick things that both kids like

We’re no strangers to screen time, and started off by giving the kids turns picking a show to watch. First Charlie would pick an episode of his favorite show, and then Olive would pick an episode of her favorite show.

We quickly found out that trading off favorites like this would cause massive fights: Charlie would pick WordGirl (Olive hated it, since she’s too young) and then Olive would pick Barbie Life in the Dreamhouse (which Charlie hated and in all fairness, is such a vacuous and horrible show that we eventually had to ban it). They would refuse to watch each other’s shows and would bicker over each others’ selections.

So we changed the rules, and told them that they could only watch shows that they both wanted to watch. Basically they each got a veto over the others’ choices. After a lot of spirited discussion, they discovered that they both love My Little Pony, LEGO Batman and Pixar Shorts. So they watch those shows together, and watching videos together has become a source of harmony rather than conflict.

The same goes for weekend activities. As a family, we mostly do inclusive activities that both kids enjoy: gong to the botanic garden, the local park and the library.

A trip to the Met

We do try to expose each kid to things outside of their comfort zone, but if one kid hates something then we’ll take the other one to see it one-on-one.

5. Give the kids space (aka encourage secret languages)

When I was growing up, my twin brother and I had a secret language. I didn’t even realize it was a language – it was just how we spoke to each other. I had no idea but apparently this is called “cryptophasia” and is really common with twins:

It has been reported that up to 50% of young twins will have their own twin language which they use to communicate only with each other and one that can not be understood by others.[3] “In all cases known, the language consists of onomatopoeic expressions, some neologisms, but for the greatest part of words from the adult language adapted to the constrained phonological possibilities of young children. These words being hardly recognizable, the language may turn out to be completely unintelligible to speakers of the parents’ languages.

Source: Wikipedia

In retrospect, our secret language must’ve been unbearably annoying to listen to – if only because we spoke to each other mostly in our secret language and nobody else could understand it. I realize this only because lately, my kids have been spending a lot of time talking and giggling with each other and I have no idea what they’re saying. It kind of drives me crazy, so I’m not surprised that my parents forbade us from using our secret language. We eventually forgot it and reverted to using English like everyone else.

It’s funny: as a parent, you want your kids to be close – but sometimes, that closeness can mean that you as a parent are excluded. The kids are developing little inside jokes that they find hilarious and that I don’t remotely understand. I have an urge to ask them to decode all of their little jokes, but on second thought – I’ve been learning to let go and just let them have their little secrets.

So will our kids be close as adults? I have no idea! They are so different that sometimes I marvel that they’re as close as they are. But my secret hope is that if we can manage to avoid the most common ways of destroying sibling closeness, they will enter adulthood as an army of two. We shall see!

Are you close to your siblings?  What do you think is the key to your friendship?