My sister and I never fought with each other other or did really mean things to each other. My stepfamily (two girls an a boy about the same age) were a whole different story. Every holiday dinner with them it seems they bring up a new story of their childhood shenanigans and hijinks an we all laugh about it. A few of the anecdotes.
Sneaking up on a sleeping sibling and dumping ice water on him or her, or poking with a lancet (the father was a diabetic so there were boxes of these laying around). Or sticking a 9 volt battery in their mouth, this got to be rather shocking once they got braces. Or two would hold down another and do it.
One would do something in order to frame another sibling so the other one would get grounded or spanked. One infamous such incident was gouging the hood of the family car with a metal garden rake and then putting the rake in the sister’s room. Another time a sibling got a progress report home requesting a teachers conference mailed home. The boy intercepted it an threw it at the bottom of the recycle bin. Of course things got ugly when the teacher called asking why there was no response, and then the parents found it at the bottom of the recycle bin assuming the sister it was meant for had tried to hide it. Yet another time the two sisters lit a fire in the grill, then immediately left on their bicycles so the parents see the grill on fire and the boy being the only one home.
Substituting hydrogen peroxide for contact lens solution.
The boy caught a mouse and put it in one of the sister’s desk drawer.
The boy got both sisters to do the “maze scare” prank, and popping out of the closet and saying “boo” incidents were numerous. So was tricking siblings into watching scary movies.
The line “I heard mom say you’re going to need a dozen shots” before one of the siblings had a doctor’s appointment.
The boy and one of the girls a bunch of chewed gum inside one of the sister’s bicycle helmets that she she didn’t see before putting it on.
Cockleburs and burdocks in the toe of a shoe out of sight.
A good share of the typical hair pulling / slapping type roughhousing.
Tying down a sibling to the bed, smearing peanut butter on her armpits and bottom of her feet, an then turning the family dog loose to lick it.
Some of this seemed to be done because they thought it was funny, some as revenge for a perceived slight or as revenge for a previous incident. Does all of this strike you as normal sibling rivalry and myself and my sister were tame to each other, or is this kind of stuff out of bounds of the stuff siblings do to each other. Anyone else got wild stories? The parents did their best to keep a lid on things. I do know that at various times some of the family were treated for depression, and they’re now all responsible adults- one is a priest, one is a computer programmer, and one an insurance agent.
Yeah, I really don’t like a lot of that behavior and it goes way, way past sibling hijinx in my book. A big line that’s being crossed is the ganging up to hold one sibling down to do painful things–I would not have put up with shit like that from my kids for one minute and my parents would have had our hides if my siblings and I had acted like that.
Yeah, it’s normal. I don’t know how much of that is normal, my brothers and I did some things like this, but it broke down into out and out fighting pretty quickly. Your step family’s stories aren’t unusual.
When I was little, my older brothers were playing with the walkie-talkies one of them had gotten as a Christmas gift and they broke one of the antennas. They put the broken radio under my pillow, and I got blamed. I vowed that when I was a parent I’d see through such pathetic attempts at setups, but I don’t recall my kids ever trying. I’ve got countless other stories similar to yours, but am more interested in hearing what others will surely post.
I hear this kind of thing the most from large families where parents just can’t keep up with it all. My parents were hard on us but they couldn’t stop us, there were just three of us, and we had to be left alone sometimes.
Trying to get siblings in trouble is normal, but these go too far.
This went WAY too far!
Normal prank. Hell, I once got my mom by putting a mouse-shaped cat toy in the coffee cup cubbard.
Totally normal, my brother and I did stuff like that all the time.
Normal. My brother and I never did it, but neither of us were afraid of needles
Typical prank. Kids are mean.
Typical pranks. Kids are mean.
Are you sure you never did this type of thing with sister? Totally normal sibling behavior.
The tying down part is a bit overboard, but overall it’s not too bad.
Sibling prank each other, squabble and rough-house. One day my brother tricked me into eating a “mint Oreo” (really an Oreo with toothpaste in it), the next day I scared the literal piss out of him by sliding a peacock feather under the bathroom door. And we laugh about it now. We also played nice, but those instances are less memorable.
The majority of those are way out of bounds, IMO, and I’d be pretty upset if my kids were going that far with each other. Particularly the hydrogen peroxide one - shit, you could blind someone that way.
The mouse, the scare jumps and teasing about the doctor are fine. My kids also wrestle, try to boop each other’s noses, and make snarky comments, but they don’t actually try to hurt each other.
I have no stories of my own - I’m eleven years older than my bro. I didn’t do mean stuff to him and he couldn’t do mean stuff to me
Not something my family did, or any family we were friends with. I’ve known several kids who were mean or worse to non-family members, and my brother took advantage of the fact that my parents (particularly my Dad) liked him better. But not for the shear joy of doing it.
I think partly because me and the people I’ve known weren’t creative enough for that kind of cruelty, and partly because we weren’t assholes.
I only had one cousin who was asshole enough to pull any of that shit, and he still has a Reputation 40 years later; my aunt’s first husband was at that level of asshole, my brother’s FiL and BiL as well. Stories like those make me appreciate my family.
My brother and I beat the ever-loving shit out of each other as kids. There were emergency-room visits. Mom was at her wit’s end.
These days, we’re the best of friends. We trade some good-natured barbs and trash talk on Facebook when it comes to fantasy football, but other than that we’re BFFs and get along swimmingly. Neither of us are assholes in our personal lives, and we’re both kind, gentle, and loving family men.
On our second date my soon-to-be husband and I bonded by swapping stories of torturing our little brothers. I buried mine (up to the chest, in the back yard when we were around 5ish) and he shot his (and I quote: “hey Kurt, eat lead!”).
We had one of those office Swingline staplers that you could open up and use on large objects. I once whacked my brother in with it and stapled his pants to his butt. *He left the damn staple in his butt for an hour *until Mom came home to prove it. She then promptly chased me a couple of laps around the house swinging that stapler!
I also bought some itching powder once and put in down my brother’s shirt. I think it was just some kind of fibers. Mom avenged him by putting some down my shirt.
Nobody did anything like that in my family. My siblings were all girls. My parents weren’t the best in the world, but they didn’t take any pleasure in hurting or humiliating people.
My husband’s family, all the time. Bullying, taunting, insulting, practical “jokes”, endless. Four boys and one girl who was very much a tomboy jock. His mother was also a sadistic bully, though it was always subtle, nothing obvious. Her siblings were like her (not subtle, in the males). I found it revolting and when she tried it on my toddler daughter while we were staying there, it was the last straw, I never visited there again (they were on the opposite side of the country, thankfully).
My take was it was either modeled or inherited or a combo. Not “normal” to me.
I’d rather hear that from the brothers. My older brother bullied and tormented for most of my childhood, and my mother handwaved it away. I’m sure she thought I was fine.
I shudder to think what would happen if my siblings and I tried to pull stuff like that off. Our father would probably sit us all down for a firm but loving conversation about how were were family and had to look after each other. He would have talked for *at least *two hours. Dad could really hold forth when he cared to, and none of us wanted that.
My younger brother and I teased each other and had some battles with resulting bruises, scrapes, and hurt feelings.
Then when he turned 10, things started to escalate. He hit me with a bat, a stool, other things. We had an us v them thing with the parents, so I didn’t say much.
But when he shot me with his BB pistol that hurt. When at age 12, he chased me to see how it would go with the .22 pistol he found, I didn’t hang around and let him complete that experiment. I don’t consider that normal behavior. My Dad did get the pistol from him and returned it to the place it was taken from.
When people say kids will be kids, I hope those kids aren’t like my little brother was. I don’t talk to him anymore because even though he eventually quit literally kicking my ass, he still picked fights about everything until I told him to leave my house one Christmas day, in 2005 or 2006.
My brother and I would fight sometimes, almost always after we somehow irritated one another, including physically though most of the physical aggression came from him. There was none other the premeditated meanness described in the OP, however.
Some of that sounds totally normal (like the ice thing), but some of it is really dangerous, especially the hydrogen peroxide. I guess a mitigating factor for the overall behaviour is that it doesn’t sound like it was one sibling who was the main target, rather all of them thinking up mean pranks.
