Sibling Co-Dependency (Guest post by Teacher Wallace Yovetich)

I’ve been thinking about something since the Rainforest Parent Ed conversation. Sometimes I need to let something season (a new term I’ve learned at my son’s school that means to let a thought have time to form in your mind before you express it) before I have an answer that feels right. 

That night, at the Parent Ed, we discussed what it’s like to have children of different ages (and temperaments) in the same household, what to expect from each child, and how to keep it fair. I shared that I only have one child (something that I felt very relieved about that night… juuuust kidddding – but also not really kidding), so I’m not going to claim to be the wisest in this area. However, I’ve been an educator of children of various ages for a long while now, and I come from a family of four children - various ages and genders all raised in mostly the 80s when it wasn’t so strange to expect your daughters to do things that you wouldn’t expect your sons to do. For reference, I’m the third child - first girl after two boys. Yes… this probably contributes to my desire to make sure everyone is following the rules, while loudly voicing my opinions. I can’t be blamed. ;)

Though Dr. Becky from Good Inside isn’t the only person I’ve heard talk about the following, she is one of the trendiest people of the moment to be talking about this: the responsibilities we put on our children as siblings can model, and ingrain, codependency in ways that we don’t necessarily want for their future. Dr. Becky has talked about making sure that if you have a big feeling child in your house that you don’t make the child with the quieter feelings responsible for the big feeler’s responses. For example - “Charlie” gets in a rage if they don’t get to sit in the front seat. Those rages make everyone exhausted. The parents ask “Tommy” if they’re ok sitting in the backseat on the rides home from school so that everyone can have a peaceful end of day each day. Sounds reasonable right? But what we’ve just taught Tommy is that they are responsible for taking care of Charlie’s feelings. Over time, Tommy starts realizing that giving up what they need or want can make life easier for people around them and it becomes a pattern. Before you know it, Tommy is an adult who is stressed beyond capacity because they are constantly trying to guess how to manage people’s feelings, and then feeling like a failure when that doesn’t happen because (spoiler alert) you actually cannot manage other people’s feelings. 

Is there really another way? And is it so bad if Tommy learns to be selfless and create harmony? Well, yes - my favorite experts (and I) argue that big feelings are a grown up’s job to take care of. Charlie might be exhausting when in dysregulation mode (raging), but that is not Tommy’s responsibility. Tommy is a child, and needs space to have a childhood. They should still be allowed to not only have turns in the front seat, but should be given the message that if Charlie gets upset, that’s something the grown-ups will help Charlie with; those feelings are neither Tommy’s fault nor Tommy’s job to handle.  Charlie can have big feelings (also not Charlie’s fault, rather just how Charlie is wired) and a grown up will be there to hold space and keep people safe; not Tommy. 

Perhaps this is relevant in lots of ways. For example, if one child played with three toys, and their sibling dumped out the entire box of LEGO and doesn’t want to clean it up - maybe it’s ok to have this very honest conversation: You’re sibling played with these three toys and they are putting them away where they belong, and then they’ll get to do something else. You dumped out all of those LEGO, so I’ll stay with you while you pick them up. It’s ok if you are mad; you can be mad, I’ll wait. 

And then YOU wait with that child, holding space for feelings, while the other child gets to go ahead and move onto the next thing after they’ve taken care of their responsibilities. Perhaps this is where authentic communication in families starts, and where codependency ends. 

This is food for thought, not gospel. Every child deserves a childhood to the best of our abilities to give them one. I am observing that “fairness” is really a distraction of our thoughts and our best parenting intentions rather than a concept that any of us could actually define in any conclusive way; here is your permission to question it. As much as we can keep our children from needing to parent their siblings, or take care of anyone else’s big feelings while they are still children - I encourage us to at least try.