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Raising Siblings Without Warfare
We did it, but we are surprised that it worked
Do you remember when your kids were little, and they fought ALL the time? Weren’t there moments when one said something like, “He was looking at me!” and expected you to intervene? Don’t you remember days when you had to cut one goldfish cracker into three pieces so the snacks would be “fair”? I do. I remember feeling like I was being held hostage by a group of insane monkeys. I felt like I was holding on by a thread.
I know that for me, as a mom of three, there were honest-to-God situations in which I yelled, “If no bones are broken stop bothering me!”
When my second child was just over two years old, I caught his big sister kicking him in the butt to knock him off the front steps. When the second child was 8 and his brother was 6, I heard them in a screaming argument about the color of a tiny leggo piece.
I firmly believed, with great sadness, that my children would grow up to be virtual strangers if not mortal enemies. I didn’t think they’d ever like each other.
But the years flew by, and my two sons stopped screaming about leggo pieces. They made the same friends. They formed a band that practiced in our basement. They went to college in the same part of the state and dated girls who knew each other.
