&quote;Mom, Jason's Breathing on Me!&quote; (eBook)

The Solution to Sibling Bickering Mary Alice and I--What We Did We had a three-part plan. 1. If we intervened in squabbling between Nick and Margaret, it would never be on one side or the other. 'The two of you stop it.' The one and only exception was if there was potential harm to one or the other (and harm does not mean only pain). 2. The point in the squabbling at which we would intervene was as soon as we started to get irritated. 3. We would never listen to what went on. And I mean never. Again, the only exception was if there was potential harm to one or the other child. That was it. Those were the rules. And they worked. And because they worked, we kept using them. The results were spectacular. Nick and Margaret bickered, but what made all the difference for Mary Alice and me was that we did not get the constant, 'Nicky kicked my sticker album.' 'I did not, she put it down right where I was sitting.' 'I did not. Besides he's not the boss of the TV room.' 'Mom, she's lying.' 'Nicky, you're a liar.' 'Dad, he's going to hit me.' We didn't get any of that because from early on both Nick and Margaret learned that if they came to us with their bickering, what they would get--always--was nothing. So they did not include us, because there was no reason to. One gigantic benefit of our procedure was that it eliminated, absolutely and wholly removed, the number one cause of sibling rivalry: trying to get a parent on your side. We wouldn't do it. We refused to enter that arena. The great parental courtroom to which grievances are taken and final judgment made of who was right and who was wrong, the court that is such a huge part of virtually all childhoods, certainly mine, that court, the judgment from which engenders such sibling passion, for Nick and Margaret was empty. The judge wasn't there. There was no judge. Nick and Margaret had many disagreements, the same disagreements all siblings have. But the disagreements were about whatever they were disagreeing about: who is hogging too much of the seat, who gets the slightly broken cookie, who gets to use the red Magic Marker, intrusion on each other's space. What the disagreements were never about was on whose side Mary Alice or I would be. That element, parent favor or not, never came into the disagreements, was not a part of them. In their disagreements, a parent was not even part of the equation. And since it was impossible to get a parent on your side--nor could your sibling get your parent on his or her side--grievances between the two were limited to the specifics of day to day. The heart of true enmity between siblings was absent. Parent favor was never on the table. The constant sibling squabbling that can wear you down and so totally drain the fun and any pleasure out of time spent with your children didn't exist. We were out of the loop. The squabbling that did occur was not the stomach-tightening Oh, no, here they go again, with whatever peace you had at any given moment instantly replaced by that familiar tension. This was not part of our raising of Nick and Margaret. One thing that I can say as an absolute fact is that when they were growing up, being with Nick and Margaret was fun. I know. I was there. I do remember. Maybe not always, maybe not all the time, but overwhelmingly being with them was fun. Maybe this is a tribute to them, their personalities when growing up. Maybe it was because of what else Mary Alice and I did or did not do as parents. But I also have no doubt that a major part of the enjoyableness of Nick and Margaret, how we could go places, be places with them, so differ- ent from when I was growing up, was...