Problem Siblings

By Joan Pickett, LPC

Joan Pickett, LPC

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Problem Siblings

Families sometimes struggle with a problem sibling, a child who has caused upheaval and even violence in the home. These children are resistant to any kind of guidance or consequences, seemingly born to cause trouble for themselves and their parents.

The parents' focus is always on this child, as they try to contain the destruction and solve problems when they arise. The child's siblings have to get along as best they can.

The diagnosis which describes such a child is “oppositional defiant”. Such children can disrupt the entire family system, often by bullying siblings or stealing their possessions or breaking rules which bring the parents into power struggles with the oppositional child, resulting in loud arguments or fights which frighten the other children. Sometimes the police have to be called when violence ensues.

Often the parents are brought into conflict with one another when they don't agree on the measures to use in raising the oppositional child. When the child's behavior causes the school and the police to become involved the child's siblings have to face their friends and teachers, as well as the community at large.

This can be traumatic in the extreme. But the climate in the house even when there is no upheaval is tense, as everyone waits for the next dramatic event.

Children need to feel safe, and when there is a problem sibling it may not appear to affect the other children, but the reality can be very different. Children develop coping mechanisms which serve to help them to survive such volatile environments, but those very coping mechanisms, if carried to extreme can become entrenched in adulthood, causing the adult to react as they would have in childhood.

For example the adult who avoided conflict by spending as much time as possible at a friend's house may avoid family life by working long hours or abusing substances any thing to avoid close relationships. Another coping strategy is dissociation, the ability to “tune out”.

Chronic anxiety and many other emotional problems in adult life can be the result of being raised in a home with a problem sibling. Their parents have been, of necessity, so caught up in trying to contain the oppositional child that the siblings are deprived of the attention they need.

One frequent way that such a sibling can affect his sibling is in always having the role of the “bad child” leaving other children to believe that they have to be “the good one”. This can lead to an adult life of perfectionism, driving one's self to be better and more successful while never feeling that the goal has been reached.

This can lead to excessive care-taking behaviors where the adult focuses on the needs of one, or many, with no understanding of his or her own true needs and goals.

Making the connection between problematic adult behavior patterns and sibling relationships in childhood is not always immediately clear. But therapy can help make those connections and then heal the old trauma, freeing the individual to live a full and authentic life at last.