Isn’t it obvious?

I recently led another parenting workshop for a group of suburban parents. I’ve been doing this workshop for about fifteen years and it’s gotten to the point that I know when to pause to wait for specific questions. No matter the city or the crowd, when I pause at certain points I can anticipate the questions the parents in the room will ask. This time it was no different. At a certain point in the presentation I just paused and waited. A woman raised her hand and asked the question I anticipated. It’s an interesting phenomenon.

One question that always comes up is related to sibling rivalry, sort of. During the point when I address sibling rivalry inevitably a parent will raise his or her hand and ask how to handle the situation when a younger sibling is “picking on” an older one. When I ask, “How old are they?” inevitably the offending “troubling” sibling is a pre-language preschooler, a two- or three-year-old, while the older sibling is in elementary school. That’s when I ask myself, “Isn’t it obvious?”

What is obvious in this situation is that the parent is more of the problem than the troubling child. When you leave a pre-language preschooler or toddler in the same room with an older sibling without parental supervision what do you think is going to happen? Parents get frustrated that they can’t “explain” to the toddler about not “bothering” the complaining older sibling, or to leave the sibling’s toys alone, or to not pull on his or her hair or kick over or crawl over whatever it is the older sibling is playing with.

What I want to ask the parent (but don’t) is, “So whose fault is it?” The obvious answer is that it is the parents’ fault for leaving those two alone unsupervised. What parents don’t want to hear is that the formula for successful parenting is: 100% for 100%. Meaning that parenting must be done at 100% capacity for 100% of the time. You can’t decide to not parent for ten minutes and leave a toddler and an older elementary sibling in the room unsupervised. This is a simple problem to solve: be proactive, be the parent, and don’t leave the kids unsupervised. With that age configuration you’re being unfair by setting them up for failure.

It can be overwhelming to hear that parenting is done at 100%, one hundred percent of the time. But here’s the good news: you only need to do it for seven years.*

*To find out why see 10 Best Parenting Ways to Ruin Your Child by Israel Galindo. See also, 10 Best Parenting Ways to Ruin Your Teenager, by Israel Galindo and Don Reagan.