As I was the middle child, between two sisters, and everything was my fault. Even when it was demonstratively not.
My mother even admitted to it after I had moved out and gotten married. Just an offhand remark without apology, just the facts.
I think I may have preferred the “I don’t care just knock it off”
Having a wooden spoon broken on your backside really sucks, especially when you don’t even know what the girls were fighting about, or why they blamed you.
Septima:
What you’re missing is that most of the time, the parent knows EXACTLY who started it, and his or her protests to the contrary are complete BS to avoid the consequences. “I don’t care who started it” is a parent’s way of saying “I don’t believe you, but if I accuse you of lying, you’ll just argue further, so I’ll simply say I don’t care.”
Just because someone else started it does not give you a free pass to retaliate. In most cases, and especially with children, you are responsible for your own reactions to a situation.
And trying to explain that to a 6 year old who just tripped a kid that kicked sand in their face will totally work.
I experienced a slightly different version of this. My parents would sometimes sit everyone down and ask one kid what happened. That kid would give his/her vefsion in full – at which point the parents would say, “That’s it, we’ve heard enough,” and punishment would be meted out based on the one child’s statement.
I’m mostly over it, but I bitterly resented that practice as a child. Even if I was the chosen one, it bugged me.
That’s why I have only one kid.
I do think that in the next decade, there will be more attention for inter-sibling violence. The Dark Side of Siblings | Psychology Today.
Quote from the article:
Sibling abuse is far more common in families than spousal and parent-child abuse combined. John Caffaro and Allison Conn-Caffaro, authors of Sibling Abuse Trauma, call sibling assault “pandemic.” There is more of it among male children than between sisters and its intensity varies by age.
When Dick or Jane cries foul, parents tend to ignore the situation or rationalize it by telling themselves that kids will be kids, s/he didn’t mean it, or they’ll outgrow the fighting. Physical assault is often accompanied by verbal abuse with lifelong detriment to the recipient, report the Caffaro’s.
I tell my two that my life would have been a lot easier if there was only one kid to blame. Though I suspect my third child “Notme” would still exist.
(“Who didn’t flush the toilet?” “Who left the milk out overnight” “Who borrowed the car without asking and didn’t fill up the tank” - Notme is a horrible bratty child who cannot manage to follow the simplest house rules. I should have aborted that kid.)
If it’s just back-and-forth bickering over “he touched me”, then adjudicating it is a non-concern. You just don’t engage in petty bickering, no matter who started it.
If violence is involved then I do very much care who started it, but that’s not the first concern on my mind. The first concern is reprimanding whoever got caught red-handed, and then I will find the other offenders. There’s a good chance I’ll never know who started it, but at least I can punish the violent behavior I know about.
It may be that parents forget what it’s like to be a kid. It’s absolutely true that kids have no fucking idea what it’s like to be a parent.
Every parent I talk to has gone through the experience of realizing that your children are doing the exact same thing you did as a child, and it’s complete and utter bullshit. Yes, we usually do remember what it’s like to be a kid, it’s just that now, with added experience, we also see that there’s a lot more going on than the kid is aware of.
And yes, kids absolutely need to learn a sense of proportion, and that every little injustice in the world is not going to be addressed. Something I say to my kids on occasion, (say when they complain how unfair I’m being because I’m not listening to why something that happened 3 weeks ago somehow affects who gets to sit in the front seat for the 10 minute drive to school today): “Yes, I’m unfair. Terribly, terribly unfair. And I love you more than any other person in the world loves you. Imagine what will happen when you have to listen to people who don’t even like you.”
If two adults are arrested for disturbing the peace then there has to be very good evidence that only of them is responsible for the disturbance or the judge is going to treat them just like two kids in the back seat of the car.
Take away their electronics and start singing along to the radio?
BEFORE I COME IN:
Sarah puts down the balloon to go take a bite of cheese stick. Drops the cheese stick on the floor.
Marcy picks up the balloon and plays with it.
Sarah steps on the cheese stick, grinding it into the carpet, and reaches for the balloon. When Marcy doesn’t hand it over, Sarah grabs the balloon back from Marcy.
Marcy shouts, “HEY!” and grabs it back, so hard that Sarah stumbles.
Sarah falls down on purpose and starts to cry. She kicks ineffectually at Marcy.
“DADDY!”
WHEN I COME IN:
Both children start trying to shout over each other to explain their version of events, complete with reverse-order and mentions of whose party the balloon came from and the flavor of the cheese stick and what Marcy said to Sarah two weeks ago and sobs and repetitions. I don’t know exactly what happened, but I can tell both kids are acting like jerks.
This is the point where I take the balloon away, tell them I don’t want to hear about what happened, tell them that when they’ve come up with a plan for playing nicely together and cleaned the damned cheese out of the carpet, they can have the balloon back.
Bourbon’s in the cabinet.
I will never be convinced that this isn’t simply lazy parenting/teaching
Ok, we get that its hard to trust which child is telling the truth when they both tell you the other started it. And without a time machine, there’s no way to figure it out. But the lesson should be “Whoever started it is wrong, unless the retaliator reacts with disproportionate force”, but that’s a hard concept to teach to kids. So parents and teachers become lazy and tell them both to stop it
As someone who was on the end of some bullying as a kid, if I ever have kids, I’ve promised myself I’ll never resort to that. I might just tell them both to shut up if I don’t want to deal with it, but instead of an ill-advised quip about not caring who started it, I’ll leave them with a vague threat where I’ll blame who started it and promise to find out and punish them accordingly
Of course it won’t work to explain it. That’s why you don’t bother explaining it (much). You may say it, but it won’t end the dispute.
What will end the dispute is showing it. And you show it by telling the kids that it doesn’t matter who started it, they’re now both behaving inappropriately and both have to stop it, and then forcing them into a position of stopping it by taking away the item or removing them from each other’s presence if they can’t get themselves under control.
And then they stomp off and pout for a bit, and when they are calmer, they may come back and explain what happened with a bit more insight. That’s when you work with the kid to figure out better strategies for dealing with people treating them like that.
No one never learned nothin’ while angry. The heat of an argument is not the time for explaining.
We’ve all been there before we had kids. Reality doesn’t cooperate with our plans that easily.
Except that’s typically not what happens. It’s more like A gives a dirty look to B. B flips off A. A sticks his tongue out at B. B puts his foot on A’s book. etc…etc. eventually A and B are hitting each other.
By the time the parents get involved, there have been a number of escalations on both sides. The first transgression was something trivial, but then the other kid responded with a slight escalation, then the first kid escalates that, then the other kid escalates, etc. There’s often no point in trying to get to the bottom of things because it’s vague and muddled. Child A may say he gave the initial dirty look to B because of something B did. Each person feels fully justified in what they did.
Sometimes it is also an acknowledgement that neither party is an innocent victim.
My mother was well aware that there many, many situations in which neither of her children who were currently raising a ruckus were innocent victims of the wrongdoing of their sibling. If things have escalated to the point where a parent is obliged to intervene, quite often both (or all) of the children involved have committed punishable acts. Saying “I don’t care who started it” is basically a short way to indicate that while there was probably some sort of spark to start the conflagration, nobody’s hands are clean and now the parent is primarily concerned with putting out the fire.
For example, it was wrong of my niece to call her brother a stupid jerk, but it was wrong of him to steal her iPhone and declaim selected portions of her text history to a group of his friends, and it was wrong of her to throw an orange at his “stupid jerk face” and wrong of him to rub his butt all over her favorite jacket while declaring he was farting and so on and so forth - at some point, a parent just recognizes that you have two bad actors all up in each other’s grill - and since neither one of them is behaving in a socially acceptable manner, it really doesn’t matter who set off the blaze.
“I don’t care who started it” tends to be the parental equivalent of a fire hose. First, you put out the fire, then you figure out what caused it and how to prevent future fires. WhyNot is right - nobody learns anything when they’re pissed. The time for the teachable moment is later, when everyone has calmed the hell down. Assuming it’s appropriate for a teachable moment - most of the time, everyone involved is well aware of what they did that they oughtn’t have done.
First, the advice of non-parents on parenting is always appreciated to its full value. I’d say more, but I have an angry email I need to send Neil DeGrasse Tyson about astrophysics, based on what I learned from single Twinkle Twinkle Little Star when I was a kid.
Second, if a parent uses this response in an actual occasion of bullying, they’re not parenting correctly, you’re right. It’s usually pretty obvious within a few seconds whether it’s bullying or bickering. Bickering is much more common, and both parties are aggrieved, and both parties acted poorly. In bullying, one party is acting far too innocent and wide-eyed, and the other party looks withdrawn and frightened.
If it’s not obvious–if bullying seems a distinct possibility–the parent should investigate further. But that’s an entirely different conversation.
Third, your suggested alternate strategy–making absurd and impractical threats–is exactly the sort of excellent parenting strategy that non-parents love to suggest :).
I used to think this way, but then this
this
this
and this
happened.
When Squeaky and Spike are fighting because Spike stomped on Squeaky’s foot because Squeaky was staring at Spike because Spike was huffing and puffing about how Squeaky was bragging about eating the last breakfast bar, when Spike doesn’t even LIKE breakfast bars, it doesn’t matter who started it. They just wanted to fight.
I hate snow days.