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.
