We're often told that being a kid is great. When you're a kid, you don't have to pay the bills, deal with the DMV, cook dinner, save for retirement, keep your health insurance, get out of debt, or any of those stressful responsibilities adults face every day. Children are pretty much free to do whatever they want. Heck, you can't even go to jail when you're a kid! Children certainly have it good living a life free of responsibilities.
But there's a catch. Children may not have responsibilities, but in exchange for that, they also don't have any freedom. When Mom and Dad are in charge, the kids don't have a say. Children are too young to manage money or make their own meals, and so we expect their parents to handle that for them. Actually, there are many responsibilities--like family discipline--that children can't and shouldn't handle. Hopefully, the parents are responsible adults who make good decisions. But what happens when the parents don't do that? All of a sudden, "lucky" children aren't so lucky anymore. Because when you're a kid, and your parents mess up, you pay the price.
In my family, sibling abuse was happening right underneath my parents' noses, and they didn't mutter a word about it. In fact, they even encouraged it! One time, my mother, sister and I were at a church potluck, filling our plates from the buffet table. My sister had just gotten to the bowl of re-fried beans, when she turned around to me and said, in a loud voice, "Sybil, don't take any beans. They always make you fart." My mom was standing immediately across from her and heard every word. I will always remember her reaction. Rather than disciplining my sister, my mom laughed and then said, "Oh, guess who shares a room! Ha ha ha!" Even back then, I remember thinking that my mom should have done something to stop her, and feeling hurt, humiliated and disappointed that she hadn't protected me.
What was possibly even worse was that my parents took away my power to protect myself. My dad was the worst offender. If he heard bickering in the background, he didn't care at all for the cause of the fight, he just wanted it ended. One time, we were in the car, and the same sister mentioned above began picking a fight with another one of my siblings. Getting angrier and angrier, I rushed to my other sibling's defense. My sister in turn screamed at me, enough to make me want to cry. I was just about to defend myself, when my dad yelled back, "Thank you, thank you," his words for "stop fighting right now!!!" And when we got home, I did cry. For about two hours.
When the car incident happened, I was in a period of my life where I had decided that enough was enough: I wasn't going to take any more crap from my siblings. I was finally going to stand up for myself and force my sisters to treat me right. "Devastated" is not a strong enough word to convey how I felt when my efforts didn't work. What disappointed me even more was my father not only not supporting me, but doing the opposite. He didn't care that my feelings were hurt, that my sister had just attacked me, and I needed to defend myself. He only cared about his own irritation towards the bickering (something he signed himself up for when he decided to have more than one child, I might add), and casually brushed my feelings aside.
The helplessness I felt as a result of my parents' actions was something I carried with me outside of the home. I struggled a lot to stand up for myself in the real world, afraid that fighting back would only bring me more pain. It was only years later that I began feeling a sense of control over my life again. In my twenties, I began noticing that I could stand up for myself when there wasn't another person yelling at me for doing so. I felt so much freer when I gained that little bit of control.
It is important for parents to realize their role in shaping the outcome of sibling abuse. We're taught that parents do nothing but positive things for their children: they feed, clothe, nurture, and protect their children. They put their children on the right path. When parents do do their jobs right, they really reap the benefits in how their children behave. But parents can also do many negative things--things that harm the family. Parents can make their children powerless, fail to correct children who misbehave, damage their children and render them less capable in the real world.
Taking a stand against sibling abuse means not only taking a stand against abusive children, but also against ineffective parenting methods. Parents, take a closer look at how you work with your children, and honestly evaluate if you need to change your ways. It is only when you do that when your children will change theirs as well.
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