Hello and welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. So glad you could make time to join us, just at least for a little while this week. You know, I've been doing a few workshops, as I usually do, and sitting with a bunch of parents, and this theme of sibling tensions, conflicts between brothers and sisters, it really keeps coming up so very, very much.
And I've seen, I'm guessing it's a rise, really, at least more questions coming my way, more than ever before, about sibling issues. And it set me thinking, why? You know, why has this come up? And I think there's, you know, of course, there's so many layers to a question like this. But underneath it all, I think often when kids fight, they're really fighting for control.
And they're fighting, and they go into this, like a hyper-controlling sort of cycle that just loops and loops. And there seems to be, you know, little break from it. Sometimes it seems like there's almost no end to it.
And it can wear us so thin as parents. You know, and it really is, it not just wears us thin, but it's so disappointing, really, isn't it? You know, we don't really want it. It's not a part of what, you know, we hold dear with our family.
It seems to cut across a lot of the values that we, you know, inwardly, whether they're voiced or not, you know, that we carry as a family. And so I wanted to look a little bit at the foundations of it first today. And then we'll extend in some other podcasts about it as well.
One of the things that I've noticed helps ease sibling tensions a lot, and I've worked with many, many parents over the years with this, is to let the kids know who's in charge. Now, I know this sounds really kind of basic, but just bear with me while I explain this just a little bit. Is that we're living in a time where it's become more and more popular to have our kids be friends.
And we might, you know, refer to them as buddy or dude, or they, you know, we call them buddy, they call us dudes, or I'm the doody daddy, and they're the little buddy. I love the warmth of it, and I love the connection of it. But what I don't love is the confusion of it.
Because when we are in a sense peer parenting like this, in other words, we risk becoming the kids' peers, then they don't know who's in charge. And when a child doesn't know who's in charge, a very primal switch gets flipped in a child's brain. And that switch is that of survival.
Because a child is young, is little, even through the teen years, they're still very dependent on us to provide and to protect for them. And that primal switch says, if no one is in charge, someone has to be. I've got to step up, so I've got to step into that space, otherwise we're not safe.
And there is a kind of a motor, a very primal amygdala-driven motor, which starts running, and it starts running hard, and it starts running fast. And so a child will essentially step into what I think of as a leadership vacuum. And they'll step into it and become controlling of the family, including parents.
They'll become controlling particularly of other siblings. And there is this hyper-controlling, which you almost get a sense sometimes that there's a desperation behind it. There's something very primal driving it.
And it's a hard one to understand because you're being so friendly to a child. You're trying to be their friend, trying to help them through in as friendly a way as possible. Meanwhile, they're just hardwired when we confuse being friends with being friendly.
Kids are hardwired to actually spot that kind of gap because that gap means I'm not safe. If no one is protecting and no one is providing, if this big person living in my home, known as my parent, is my friend, then who's in charge? Who's going to take care of me? Now, one child is going through this, but if you've got a couple of kids, two, three or more kids, they're all going through it. The other one will go through it as well.
So the second child will start running exactly the same loops. I don't know who's in charge. I don't know who's keeping me safe, who's keeping me secure.
I'd better step into this leadership vacuum. Otherwise, it's not going to be okay. And so they're driven by these very primitive forces as well.
Now, do you see the collision course here? Because if you've got two or three kids who are basically all having that fight-or-flight brain triggered, then they start turning to each other and start trying to fill that leadership vacuum, and that's very understandable. As I said, it's become so vogue, so trendy now to parent kids in a friendly, goofy sort of way, but the neurology hasn't changed over all these thousands of years, and now the kids will start going at each other. This is the main point, is that through our very understandable wish to be friends and with our children and be close and so on and kind of buy into this whole modern family way of quipping and talking back and getting involved, all sorts of kind of groovy way of talking with kids and not really holding our space as an adult, then now you've got two or three kids who are all vying for that leadership position, and that is so at the heart of so many sibling tensions, aggressions, rivalries, and we hear this term, right, rivalries, sibling rivalry, but what are they fighting over? If they're rivals, there's got to be something they're fighting over, and it's not just over ordinary who's the best, who's the most powerful.
Siblings have been doing that for a long, long time. This takes a bigger kind of import. It now takes on this desperation of not just who's in charge, but who's going to help me survive, and the fighting is partly driven, perhaps substantially driven, it's different in different families, of course, by this very, very instinctual response.
Now, if this is the case, then the answer is also within the problem. Again, working with countless numbers of parents in my private counseling practice, which I still have, obviously, to this day, I'd never not do that. When a parent really examines where are the points where I'm not really in charge, am I letting my children talk over the top of me, interrupt my conversations, demand things of me, talk in a very disrespectful way to me? Am I a bit of a doormat to them at times? Are they not thanking one parent or another for driving them all over town, preparing them a lovely nutritious meal? Do they just get up and leave the table? All these things where a child is not being signaled, wait, wait, wait, wait, we are in charge here.
Your parents are, and this is the key thing, your parents are the holders of the values of this family. And when you step over the line and forget the values, like getting up from the table and just walking away, one of our values is that we all pitch in and help. That means you help clear the table, you help do the dishes, you help, you help.
If that's one of your key family values, for example, as it is in many families, then a parent is going to be, when a parent steps into that space, then the children can stand down. And the fast track to reassuming clear, kind, but firm leadership in a family is to really sit and think about your values. What is it that you value the most? It could be, in my family, for example, we have a value that it's okay if we share differing perspectives.
And I'll come more to that in a moment, by the way, in terms of sibling issues. But that's just a value that we've always carried in our home. And if you can sit down and really think about the values and reestablish what they are, what it is that you hold dear, then it leads us quickly, more quickly than it otherwise would have, back into that leadership space.
If you really want to take a deeper dive into this, a lot of the Soul of Discipline book that I wrote really does delve right down into this, particularly in the first couple of chapters, about how to regain that leadership, that leadership quality, again, in our families. But one of the main results is that over the weeks and months, as you step more back into that loving, firm leadership role, the children's adrenaline, cortisol, all those ancient drivers of fight, flight, and freeze, flock behavior will start to stand down, will start to calm down. And you'll notice that the first stage, many parents have said to me, is that when the kids fight, I can sort it out in an easier way.
In other words, it's a bit more malleable. They're not fighting for their lives, because sometimes when kids fight, prior to an adult stepping back into the leadership space, it almost seems like they're fighting for their lives, that they are willing to die on that hill in that fight about that toy or whatever it is. There's a desperation to it.
What a lot of parents report is that while the kids will still fight, the degree of desperation is no longer there. It's just an ordinary fight now, and it's much easier to sort out, it's much easier to redirect than it was before. And that is golden, right? I'm not suggesting being in a leadership role will absolutely ensure that kids will never fight, but it's pulling them back from seeing every disagreement as a fight for their lives, a fight for their survival.
Because unless they know who's in charge, that is what the brain is telling them. Your survival depends on this. That ancient brain is not very discerning in that sense.
So this is a large foundation for all that we'll follow up about talking about sibling tensions and sibling issues. But if this one is understood, and this one is reintroduced back into a family, then you've got foundations to build on. Basically, when kids fight as if their life depends on it, it's signaling you as a parent to get more back into that leadership role.
We need to step back in. It's a helpful signal if you know what to look for. Regular fighting of siblings, not so much.
That's just normal stuff. But when you just get this hunch of why is this so desperate, and why is it happening several times a day, then it's signaling to you, get your hands back on the driving wheel, back on the tiller, step back into that leadership space so that the kids' biochemistry and neurochemistry can just calm on down. Okay, I sure hope that's helpful.
Okay, bye-bye.
