Sibling rivalry is generally caused by these troubling environmental influences which can cause or negatively impact the way that siblings relate with one another:

1.     Marital discord
2.     An unstable routine
3.     Much stress, unhappiness, impatience or emotional explosiveness expressing from a parent or other member of the household
4.     A parent who seems emotionally absent or inaccessible
5.     Routinely modeling inappropriate behavior that you do not wish the child to repeat
6.     Situations in which the child receives inadequate supervision
7.     Reacting too critically or harshly toward the child

If your siblings display ugly sibling rivalry, look over the above list to see where you can begin making some improvements.  You will find it virtually impossible to improve the way your children treat one another in a context of these influences.

You can always make some degree of improvement.  Sometimes it amounts to very little. Sometimes, the best you can do is to improve your way of accepting the way things are. Whatever degree of improvement you can make, though, is worth the effort, because it produces positive change and leads to more opportunities.

So begin your work on improving how your children get along by working on their surrounding influences. While this may seem like an indirect path to progress it actually addresses the root causes of the problem.

Do you yell at your siblings to stop them from yelling at one another? Do you lose your composure and react with much frustration when they lose their patience with one another?  Do you harshly criticize your children, injuring their self-esteem, when they viciously attack one another?  These are examples of how we parents undermine our efforts to improve child behavior by modeling the very behavior problems that we want our children to change.

While you are not entirely responsible for the way things are in your life, your results in all areas are, at least to some extent, a product of how you think, feel, speak and act.  Until you improve how you function, you cannot improve your results in any area of life, including with your children. As long as you continue reacting in the same habitual ways, you must continue feeling trapped in the same disappointing results.

Your 7-Point Take Away

Here is your 7-point take away to begin improving the way your siblings get along. It amounts to turning the lists of 7 negative influences that open this article into 7 target-areas to work on. If you cannot seem to change things in these target-areas, you can at least improve the way that you accept the way things are. If you see no way to make any improvement, you are probably insisting on making more change than is possible, and overlooking or disregarding the tiny increments of improvement that really are achievable.

1.     Improve your way of relating with your spouse (or ex-spouse).
2.     Bring a more stable routine into your children's lives.
3.     Practice handling everything with more peace and poise, and with less stress, unhappiness, impatience or emotional explosiveness.
4.     Work on connecting with your children in a more loving, sensitive, aware way.
5.     Look for ways that you inappropriate behavior that you do not wish your child to repeat, and replace those with a higher level of functioning.
6.     Pay closer attention to your children before their behavior drifts into problematic patterns.
7.     Replace any critical or harsh ways that you have been reacting toward the child with more calm and compassionate modes of leadership.

For the past 25 years, child behavior and personal development expert Bob Lancer has been teaching parents, teachers and childcare professionals how to improve their results, and their experiences, with children of all ages through his books, recordings, seminars and websites. For more information about his work, and to receive his free "Lancer's Answers" to the challenges of raising children in today's world, see his website: www.boblancer.com.

See Also:

-My Toddler Is Jealous of Her New Sister-- How Do I Handle This?

-Sibling Rivalry: Words That Hurt?

-Sibling Rivalry: What's Normal? What's Not?