Sibling Rivalry, aka "Stop Fighting!!" (In the Car Version)

All kids fight, right?  Whether you have two or twelve, you have those days when it seems like no one can get along.  And if you have a larger family, you probably have a pair or two who particularly get on one another's nerves.  If you're like me, you sometimes think that you'd give large sums of money, or useful things like your right arm, to just get them to stop.

But sometimes, in the midst of the crazy, a flash of inspiration strikes:

One day I had all my kids in the car, and two of them (no names or genders here, to protect the guilty) just would. not. stop. fighting!  Really, they were awful.  I had another of my kids sitting up in front with me and even he said, "Wow, is that why you always tell us it makes you crazy when we fight?"  Yes, darling, it is.

After some (probably short) amount of time, which felt like an eternity, I had really just had enough.  I pulled over and said, "You two.  Separate!"  What I meant was: get away from each other so the rest of us can have some blessed peace!!  As they scrambled into other seats, shoving and squashing assorted siblings along the way, they each muttered something to the effect of, "Good!  I don't want to sit by him/her anyway!"

That's when I realized that separating wasn't the answer.

Now I'm not saying that people don't need some cooling off time, or time alone, or whatever.  But it occurred to me at that moment that the only way they were going to figure out how to get along was to practice.  I felt that telling them to "Separate!" was pretty much saying, "So you can't get along?  Ok, don't worry about it.  Go ahead and never be together.  No big deal, it's only our family."  So just as they were settling into their new seats, I said, "Actually, I changed my mind.  The two of you get to sit in the backseat together for the next month."

You can guess how excited they were to hear that.

The next two weeks were pretty awful.  One of them spent every moment bugging the life out of the other, who then let us all know exactly how annoyed they were.  I just ignored them the best I could, and told my other kids to do the same.  I wasn't totally sure how this was going to play out, but I knew that the more involved I was, the less likely it was to work.

And after about two weeks, something changed.  They stopped spending all of their energy on bugging and being bugged, and started making civil, if begrudging, comments to one another.  And those turned into friendly conversations, then to laughing and talking together exactly as every mother wishes all of her children would do with one another.

By the time the month was over, and I announced that they no longer had to sit together in the back seat, they were actually reluctant to move, since they had been having such great times together.  Success.

Sure, it wasn't permanent.  Those two have a long way to go before they can give up the "I-live-to-annoy-you/I'm-SO-annoyed-by-you" tendency they often have when they're together.  But it accomplished what I had hoped it would: it taught them that they could enjoy being together.

This photo may or may not represent the guilty parties.  It's just some of my cute kids, getting along.

We have relived that same experiment several times since then, with different combinations of children, but always with the same results: an initial "they're-fighting-so-much-I-can't-stand-it" period, followed by "we-love-being-together-or-at-least-we-like-it-now".

I'm going to call this one a win.

Kate