Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com.
This week, Albert offers advice on how to handle one of your kids complaining about the other.
John:
I do not have a good strategy for when my younger son complains about his older brother. I do not want the older to be a jerk or the younger to be a whiner. Neither party is a total innocent in this. It is not a huge issue but I also do not have a consistent response and am interested in other takes.
Just today, I happened to be reading an interesting and dismaying article by the writer Nathan Goldwag, concerning, among other things, the wreckage that a state can do to the world and itself when its leaders confuse "operations (the methods by which you intend to carry out a military campaign) for strategy (the political objectives for which the campaign is being fought)." The thrust of the piece is that U.S. leadership is making this category error all over the place, but Goldwag's primary example is Imperial Japan in 1941, when its military leaders had a logically airtight chain of reasoning for attacking the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor, carried out that attack with spectacular success, and in so doing doomed their own empire to annihilation.
I mention that here, first and foremost, to account for time otherwise spent doing nothing legible in any way as "work" at "my job." The more germane reason for bringing it up is that this distinction—between operations/tactics on the one hand, and strategy on the other—is just as important here as it is in deciding whether to, as the historian Bret Devereaux puts it, go to war with a "first-rate power" like the United States while also in the middle of "an endless, probably unwinnable war against a third-rate power (the Republic of China)."
When I was a kid, I routinely had the frustrating experience of coming to my mom with a complaint about one of my siblings (I have an older sister and a twin brother) or, really, about any other person in the world. She would listen to my complaint, then offer an infuriatingly humanizing theory for why the other person had done what they did, said what they said, or was Like That overall. Inside of myself, I would be like Goddammit, Mom! Why can't you just tell me that I am right to be mad, and encourage me to go boot the offender in the ass for once? Why do I always have to see things in the kindest and most merciful conceivable light? This is bullshit!
There are operational problems with this approach. For one thing, it pretty much always left me feeling at least a little bit unheard. For another, it could often leave a practical conflict moved no closer to resolution: Seeing through the other party's eyes is all well and good, but sometimes you do actually need to figure out how to fix the problem. Plus, it very often made me pissed off at my friggin' mom! (Here's where I should note that she came from a dysfunctional and abusive household, and became a mom at the ripe old age of 17; it's a wonder that her approach to conflict resolution didn't involve honing a knife.)
But I look back now and am forced to concede that on the whole, this turns out to have been a solid strategic approach. It contributed to me now, as an adult, extending this imaginative identification to basically everyone, whether I want to or not. Which, whether she was thinking in strategic terms or not, is basically how my mom wanted her kids to end up: inclined to mercy, even when they don't want to be. Also, my big sister and my brother are, after my wife, the people I am closest to in the world, another outcome my mom's approach to conflict and complaint at least did not prevent.
My point here is that in any given instance of your younger son complaining about his big brother, you have operational goals and you have strategic ones. The operational goals might be things like making him feel heard, validating his feelings, resolving whatever the problem is between them, or some combination of those. What is the strategic goal?
Back to me again. I have two sons. They are a mere 18 months apart in age, a gap that has produced a great deal of friction over the years. I don't mean to make it sound as though they don't get along, because they generally do, but they for sure have done a lot of complaining about each other. Like any parent, I have often felt far too frazzled and harried to have, much less to service, strategic goals beyond keeping us all alive for 24 more hours. But I know that I want my sons to be kind; to be aware of the realness and dignity of other people, even when they don't want to; and, if not now then in adulthood, to appreciate one another and always have each other's back.
The key to this, I think—big ups to my mom—is for me to do the work of seeing through their eyes.
Being a big brother is not easy. You have to be more careful and restrained with your little sibling than they are with you, even when you are still in meaningful ways little and still learning the very basics of being careful with things, like scissors and water glasses, which are a lot simpler and less annoying than a whole entire little kid who wants to play with your stuff all the time. Sometimes you will be aware that an adult—maybe even your grouchy parent!—is being unfair to your little sibling, and then you are faced with the legitimately tough challenge of deciding whether to stick up for them against a scary adult, or to abandon them and learn something horrible about yourself. Sometimes that ethical challenge will make you feel angry at your younger sibling, even though you know that's unfair. Sometimes you will want to play your new video game by yourself, and your parents will demand that you let your little brother play too, and then they will treat you like a selfish jerk for having a totally normal human desire to do something by yourself, without taking on responsibility for someone else who sucks at it.
It's draining, and occasionally parents forget that the older sibling needs to be able to just be a kid for a while sometimes, instead of always having to be a careful big brother. Sometimes what the older sibling needs, without knowing it and certainly without knowing how to express it, is for a parent to actively look and see this and extend them a little grace.
Being a little brother also is not easy! It is hard to be the smallest person in a family. Everybody thinks they know better than you. Everybody else's desires are taken more seriously than yours. Everybody is a little better at advocating for themselves than you are. Everybody is more self-possessed than you are. Everybody gets That Look on their face when you can't be as grownup as they are about something. Everybody has longer legs and more stamina than you do.
Sometimes your big brother looks at you like you are a cockroach—like the worst punishment in the whole world is you wanting to do things with him and be like him. Sometimes your big brother is unkind to you in ways he would never, ever consider being with any other kid on Earth. Apologies to John, but: Sometimes you go to your dad with a problem you are having with your big brother, and to him it is just undifferentiated complaining rather than a specific problem calling for a specific response. He doesn't want you to be a whiner.
It's unfair. You didn't ask to be born last. It's not your fault that you're small, that your legs (physical and figurative) are short, that you get tired, that you can be a drag. It's not your fault that you like little-kid movies, even after your big brother has aged out of them and your parents have already seen them 10,000 times. It's not your fault that your sheer existence forces your big brother to grow up faster than he's ready for, that this wears him out, that you are a walking, squalling, ethical conundrum for him, a temptation to go Lord of the Flies mode every time your parents leave the room.
Sometimes parents forget that the little brother is not a baby anymore—but sometimes they also forget that the little brother is littler than everybody else in ways that matter. Sometimes they sure as hell seem to forget the little brother altogether.
I encourage you to try this with your own kids, not passively but actively. Put yourself through it. A thing I value, because I am a fucking lunatic, is the piercing pain of it: How it makes me aware of my own largeness in their lives, and my capacity to blunder into making them feel like shit in a way that will stay with them after I've forgotten it. Or, on the other hand, my particular capacity as their dad to make them feel seen and understood, like they are not alone: in the moment and also enduringly, as a steady fact in their lives. That seems like a reasonable strategic goal.
As for operations that will service this strategic goal: Hear your younger son out, for the specifics of what's troubling him but also for the unexpressed content of these complaints. He needs a little mercy. I don't think you'll have—or will need—a consistent response to his complaints beyond sympathizing with him and offering to help figure out a solution together, even if he's complaining about the same thing over and over again, because those complaints aren't just a noise. They have substance and particulars. He is asking you for help with something.
And you know what? Maybe that help will take the form of helping your older son figure out better ways of dealing with his little brother! Imagine, if only for the sake of bringing your most merciful self to the situation, that your older son is clumsy but also at heart a good and caring big brother—that if he knew a way to approach conflicts that made the little brother feel considered and treated fairly, or that at least would keep the little twerp from feeling he needs to go bleating to Dad, he would use it. Maybe you will have a chance to talk to him in private: "Hey, your little brother's been feeling like crap about [neutral description of conflict]. I know he can be unreasonable about stuff sometimes, but he doesn't want to be, so let's see if us Older Guys can figure out a better way to deal with [whatever]."
At least in terms of the words you say, there won't be a consistent response when one of your sons complains about the other. Nor should there be. Hear what the problem is, on its face and at the deeper level you can see and they can't. Try to honor the feelings involved, even if the conflict itself concerns petty bullshit. Help the complainer to think of what would make him feel better, or would enable him to consider the problem resolved. Offer to help them figure out a solution. Help each of them to see the other guy's perspective.
Where consistency matters is when you pull back a little bit and answer questions about what's important to you; it's in how those answers will shape your, uh, operations, to return my tedious metaphor. When your younger son is upset or frustrated, or doesn't know how to deal with something, do you want him to feel safe and welcome coming to you, or to anyone, to talk about it? Do you want him to understand that unloading his feelings to a compassionate listener can make things better? Do you want him to dispel resentments and frustrations that might otherwise metastasize into deeper rifts between him and his brother? Or do you just want him to stop whining?
If it's the latter, simply allow yourself to regard it as whining. That'll resolve itself in him not coming to you anymore, but then both of you will have to figure out how to live with it.
