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For years, Laurie Kramer’s ‘Fun with Sisters and Brothers’ program has helped parents manage conflicts between their children. New research measures the program’s effectiveness — and highlights surprising side benefits.
Siblings between ages 4 and 8 can have up to eight fights an hour, Northeastern University psychology professor Laurie Kramer says. If you don’t live with children this age, that stat may seem a tad dramatic; if you do, you’re probably nodding your head.
Relationships with our brothers and sisters are among the most enduring and significant many of us will have in our lives, says Kramer, a clinical psychologist whose research focuses on the dynamics between young siblings. They’re also some of the most common: Approximately 80% of families in the United States have two or more children. When they aren’t getting along, it presents a potent, ubiquitous stress on parents.
“Parents often feel they don’t have a lot of tools at their disposal,” says Kramer. “I’ve long been interested in how to help families help their kids get along, from a scientific perspective.”
For over a decade, “Fun With Sisters and Brothers”, a program Kramer developed with a small team of childhood psychologists, has tried to answer those questions with in-person and online training for parents and children. In a new paper for the academic journal “Family Relations,” the team set out to quantify the effectiveness of the online program (called “More Fun With Sisters and Brothers”), which consists of a series of asynchronous modules to teach parents how to intervene effectively in sibling conflicts.
Through a series of surveys, mothers who completed the program reported that their children demonstrated “greater sibling warmth,” and “less antagonism and rivalry,” according to the paper’s abstract, adding that those positive effects were still strong months after the training’s conclusion. (Fathers participate in the program as well, but the study sample focused on responses from mothers.)
“Parents are able to teach kids these competencies, and that’s a big deal,” Kramer says. “We weren’t really sure if that could work.”An added — and unexpected — benefit was that the parents themselves were able to better manage their emotions when their kids were fighting. They also reported being better able to coordinate and communicate around conflicts with their co-parent.
“Not only are their kids gaining skills and emotion regulation; they are too,” Kramer notes. “They’re feeling more able to cope with the stressors of trying to manage this relationship between their kids, which is sometimes a little irrational and maybe a little crazy.”
The “More Fun With Sisters and Brothers” program began as in-person sessions for trained practitioners working with preschool-aged children. When Kramer joined Northeastern in 2016, she helped develop an online version geared for parents of slightly older kids.
“We incorporated a lot of the same social and emotional competencies but twisted it so that we were putting parents in the role of being the educator,” Kramer says.The shift helped expand the program on two fronts, increasing the number of families who could participate and eliminating geographical constraints. Families overseas who might benefit from the training may take part as long as they are comfortable reading and answering questions in English.
Each of the program’s four 45-minute lessons focuses on basic interpersonal skills, including bringing empathy to bear on common conflicts — trouble sharing, bossy behavior — and expanding kids’ emotional vocabulary.
“We might hear kids say, ‘I hate you,’” Kramer gives as an example. “How can you reframe that? Something like, ‘I don’t think it’s hate. I think you’re frustrated. I think you’re disappointed. I think you really wanted that to happen.’”
There’s a heavy emphasis on understanding the feelings of others, too. One situational exercise “More Fun With Sisters and Brothers” teaches is “see it your way, see it my way,” — a simple, memorable phrase to remind kids to pause in the moment and validate the heightened feelings of everyone, including themselves. Parents and kids have told Kramer that they still use “see it your way…” years after completing the program.
“We try to help kids get to a point where [everyone’s] essential needs at that moment are being met, or at least understood,” she says.
When “More Fun with Sisters and Brothers” began, its central conceit — that parents can and should intervene to manage sibling conflicts — went against much of the prevailing parenting advice, Kramer points out.
“There are a lot of popular press books out there that say parents shouldn’t get involved, and when they do, it’s just rewarding the kids for engaging. Some of the research I’ve done has shown that’s not necessarily true, especially for kids under the age of eight who may not have skills to manage on their own.”
And nurturing those relationships in early childhood is important in the long run. In outside research, close sibling relationships in adulthood have been strongly correlated with decreased loneliness and better overall mental health. Plus, Kramer adds, the skills that come to bear on getting along with our brothers and sisters — empathy, emotional regulation — can be applied to any important social relationship.
“These are all things that can be taught,” she says.