Why does sibling rivalry seem so “unimportant” to parents?
I’d like to share my thoughts on this, even though you may disagree. Sibling rivalry has far geater impact on children’s psychology and helps only to build negative feelings. This is especially true between siblings of the same sex, if the age difference is small, and if the parents openly show partiality towards one child to the detriment of the other. I know so, because I’ve “been there”. When we were thinking of having our second child, we deliberately decided to space our children by at least five years, so as to preclude rivalry if our second child were also a son. I believe a reasonable age difference between the children helps to prevent such “competitive” situations from arising, hence the 5-year spacing we desired. As it happened, our daughter was born after a gap of six and a half years. Moreover we’ve been particularly careful to be very fair to both children so as not to allow any animosity to arise between them. I’ll share an interesting story about this some other time. D
