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It's Complicated: Siblings and Jealousy.

 





If you have two or more children you will definitely have heard some version of “you love her more” or “that’s not fair, he always gets his way”.  Generally, it happens in the middle of a row about something small, who gets to lie on the big sofa or whose party get prioritised when there is only one car available.  Parents will often describe this to me as jealousy and they are probably right. 

We often use envy and jealousy interchangeably as if they mean the same thing, but they don’t.  Envy is wanting something someone else has. Jealousy is the worry that we are losing a relationship, or part of it, to someone else. Between our kids it is usually a bit of both, but a lot of it is closer to jealousy. When our teen says their sister gets everything, the new trainers might be part of it, but often the bigger part is unconscious worry about getting pushed further away from us.   

This makes sense when we think about where sibling rivalry starts. When we are very small, we depend completely on our parents, and a brother or sister means sharing their time and attention. Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish, in their book Siblings Without Rivalry, have a great way of getting us to think about this.  They ask us to imagine our partner coming home and saying they love us so much they have decided to get another partner just like us, and could we please share our things with them. It is a bit tongue in cheek, but it gives us some idea of how it might feel.

We know from the research of Jill Suitor, a sociologist in the US, that adults who felt their mum had treated them differently from their brothers and sisters were more likely to have low mood. But interestingly mums and their children often didn’t agree about which child had been treated differently in the first place. This is hard because as parents we can feel sure we have been fair and our kid can still feel they were the one who got less, and it is their sense of it that seems to stay with them.

This comes up a lot in my clinic. I hear things like “my brother was the footballer so I had to find something else” or “my sister was the clever one, so my parents lost interest in how I was doing at school”. When we spend a bit of time on it, the envy people feel towards a brother or sister is rarely about wanting their life. What often comes up is closer to grief, for the attention and appreciation they didn’t feel they got.

Treating our children differently is OK, and necessary, because they are different and need different things. One of the helpful parts of the research is that when children understand the reason and think it is fair, it doesn’t seem to bother them as much.  So, it is worth taking a moment to explain, something like “I am spending more time helping your sister at the moment because she is finding maths hard”. It also helps to say out loud that it is hard for them, “I know it’s annoying watching your sister get new shoes when you didn’t”. 

The other thing that helps is a bit of time on our own with each kid, even with our big kids. It doesn’t need to be much, ten minutes in the car or a walk to the shop is plenty, as long as they get us to themselves and have some say in what we do.

None of this is going to stop our kids from bickering and fighting but it may lessen it.  

Faber, A. and Mazlish, E. (1987). Siblings Without Rivalry: How to Help Your Children Live Together So You Can Live Too. New York: W. W. Norton.

Kowal, A. and Kramer, L. (1997). Children’s understanding of parental differential treatment. Child Development, 68(1), 113-126.

Parrott, W. G. and Smith, R. H. (1993). Distinguishing the experiences of envy and jealousy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64(6), 906-920.

Suitor, J. J., Gilligan, M., Peng, S., Jung, J. H. and Pillemer, K. (2017). Role of perceived maternal favoritism and disfavoritism in adult children’s psychological well-being. Journals of Gerontology: Series B, 72(6), 1054-1066.

 

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