From Man Cave to Dad Save: The Sweet Solution to Sibling Rivalry

It’s not about the candy, it’s about winning and losing

Let’s be clear here, my wife is responsible for disciplining the kids. I try to disappear to my man cave whenever conflict erupts. But sometimes things get a bit intractable and we have to have a parental conference.

“They just won’t stop insulting each other and fighting” said my wife, “Do something about it!”

At the time our boys were 7and 8 years old. My first reaction was to say, “Honey, they’re boys, of course they’re going to fight.”

“That’s your solution? Just let it happen? I guess you’re not interested in being a parent,” came her well-crafted response.

I took a deep breath and said, “Ok, let me think about it.” I take pride in being the ideas guy. I would have asked chatGPT for suggestions but it hadn’t been invented yet. I was on my own.

Our youngest child is extremely susceptible to bribery. I leveraged that for a few months to make him a better hockey goalie (five cents per save really adds up) until I read an article about how you should strive for internal vs external motivation. Foiled.

In this case, I came up with the brilliant idea of a modified swear jar. My wife has always allowed the kids to have a treat after a meal. I said, “Why don’t we let them each have a few Skittles as their daily treat, and every time one of them does something bad to the other, we’ll take away a skittle?”

“Let’s take away all the Skittles when they do anything bad!” my wife responded.

“How about let’s solve one problem at a time?” I replied.

And so the experiment began. The first day, neither of them had any Skittles left.

Punch. Swear. Kick. Cry.

The second day, neither of them had any Skittles left.

I said, “Maybe we should increase it from four Skittles to eight Skittles?”

“You’re giving them a quota for beating each other up?” said my incredulous wife.

“I’ve got it!” I said, snapping my fingers, “Instead of taking away Skittles, whoever started it, give their Skittle to the other one.”

And boom. It worked.

They’re Skittles, they’re tiny, they shouldn’t be so desirable that they’ll get two kids to stop fighting. But it’s not about the candy, it’s about depriving your brother of his candy.

The first day the older one got five Skittles and the younger one got three Skittles. There were tears. The next day it was reversed. There were more tears. Within a week, they were each getting all four Skittles more days than not. Within two weeks the fighting had gone down by 90%, and we were able to stop the Skittle competition completely.

We had to re-instate the Skittle shot glasses two more times that year, but in general we have two pretty great kids who are civil to each other most of the time. Now they’re teenagers and there’s little we can do to influence their behaviour anyway, so I’m happy we discovered this when they were still malleable.

Maybe I should apply this elsewhere in my life. Maybe I can get my wife to stop rolling her eyes at me by taking some of her Fruit and Nut candy bar every time she does it.

On second thought, maybe I should just get my own candy bar.