Book Review: Siblings Without Rivalry: How to Help Your Children Live Together So You Can Live Too
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“Siblings without rivalry” is a companion to Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish’s earlier work, “How to talk so kids will listen.” It’s an exploration of sibling dynamics, and what parents can do to shape these relationships in a positive way. The foundation of the books is a series of workshops in sibling dynamics which the two facilitated, and the book is formatted as a kind of transcript of these workshops - though of course, the authors have anonymized all of the details and combined many diffeent real-world parents and children into the characters who populate the fictionalized workshops that are described here. On the whole, the actual strategies for handling sibling dynamics are really wonderful; they emphasize mutual respect between the siblings, problem-solving skills, and helping children resolve conflicts on their own.
I enjoyed this book quite a bit. Its basic philosophy is very promising and eye-opening; unsurprisingly, it also goes hand-in-hand with the philosophy described in “How to talk.” It’s a very optimistic approach, and it appeals to the best in children, which I really like. At the same time, it’s not naiive about the realities of sibling dynamics, and at one point the text point-blank admits that there are some sibling relationships which will never be happy, despite the best efforts of parents. At the same time, I get the impression that the ideas contained here work in a broad swath of families. The trick is to apply them thoroughly and consistently, which is not intuitive or easy.
Perhaps the main thing I disliked about the book is its format. It’s a little different from “How to talk,” a little more reliant on the too-simplistic cartoons and a little too eager to leave some important and subtle lessons for the “back matter” within each chapter. On top of that the fictionalized workshop format tends to disorganize the material, in I suppose the same way a real-world workshop would: the text tends to digress into side-conversations a little. However these are more pet peeves than anything else.
I quite eagerly recommend this book to any parent of siblings, and would certainly encourage all parents to read “How to talk” at aroud the same time. It’s a wonderful approach to child-raising, and I think we could all do well to pick up some of the wisdom that these books have distilled so well.