One of my daughters favorite pastimes is lovingly grabbing her 1-year-old brother with her arm wrapped firmly around his neck and falling backwards with him still locked in her grip. We’re pretty sure she does this out of love, but it looks like she’s performing a WWE power move on the little guy. When she first started doing it about six months ago, my wife and I would scream in unison, “Let him go! Let him go! No, no, no!” and then pry her off of him.
Now, six months or so later, when she does this, we find ourselves still screaming, “Let him go! No, no, no!” We probably sound similar to Michael Scott yelling when he thought his office was on fire. We’re on our way,but it’s a long road ahead.
Regardless, it is so much fun to see our kids grow not only as friends but as siblings. With her being the older sister, she often (quite literally) takes him under her wing and invites him into all sorts of fun play that she loves, but she’s finding out quickly that he’s very different from her. She loves books and quietly reads to herself about her favorite animals in her comfortable reading chair. At the same time, her brother in the corner of the room is screaming at his book and wondering why it won’t break when he tries his hardest to pull it apart.
She loves princesses and dressing dolls up, but he’s not interested. He’d much rather go and try to knock whatever fragile object daddy left on the edge of the table to see it fall off … and shatter into pieces on the floor. He then enjoys watching daddy frantically clean it up.
It’s all so new to my wife and me. We, in our blissful ignorance, really thought, “how different can our kids be?” We were only accustomed to our daughter and her disdain of things falling, smashing and breaking so surely that’s what all kids dislike, right?
But a year and a half in with our son and we’re pretty sure that chaos and breaking things is his favorite experience in life. Pretty (very) sure he inherited that from me.
Mostly, however, we’re so excited for our kids that they get to have each other in life. Yes, they’re different and yes, they don’t understand each other (even at this early stage) but they have an unbreakable bond and a deep love for each other that we didn’t even have to teach them. They’ve got roads and choices ahead of them that they’ll look to each other for.
The question I keep asking myself is: How do we as their parents help them to love each other well now? We realize the basics of teaching them to apologize, share, hug and say kind things to each other, but their differences can be so unflinching. But no matter what they do to upset each other, nothing can break the bond that ties them together. That bond is the biggest strength of our daily efforts to foster healthy relationships between them and is the starting point for who they are in regards to each other. Thankfully, I don’t have to remind them who their sister or brother is. And thankfully, they loved each other before they could speak or even know the word and still do now. That’s powerful.
So, cheers to the simple truth that we don’t have to teach our children to have love for each other. We’re just teaching them how to not get concussions, snapped femurs, black eyes and things of that nature.
