Barbi Pecenco says she dearly loves her sister, Christi. And Christi says she considers Barbi her best friend.
They talk on the phone three or four times a week — Barbi’s in New York, Christi’s in Chicago — and they e-mail each other almost every day. They care about each other. They are about as close as two sisters, living 700 miles apart, can be.
This might come as surprising news to folks who knew the Pecenco sisters when they were growing up in Silver Plains, N.Y.
Back then, 10 years ago, the only time the sisters were close was when they were throwing punches at each other.
“I guess it appeared at the time that we really, seriously hated each other,” says Barbi, 26, a publicist for Maxim Online and National Geographic Traveler magazine. “And I think it seemed sometimes we wanted each other dead. But not really.”
Oh no? The Pecenco sisters carried sibling conflict to new heights. They fought with their fists, they pulled hair, they attacked each other with pencils or telephones or whatever objects were at hand.
Of course, there were always good reasons for these brawls.
“We could fight over anything,” Barbi says. “It was like, Hmmmm, if Michael Jackson met us, who would he like better? He’d like me. No, he’d like me. And we’d fight over that, punching each other.”
“My sister and I fought (for control of) the phone daily, probably 10 times a day,” says Christi, 25, an executive assistant to the president for Futures Systems, a Loop software company. “Especially in the summer when we had nothing to do and nowhere to go. Instead of having fun with each other, we’d be on the phone with friends. Then it was, `You’ve been on long enough.’ `No I haven’t.’ And the fights would start.
“We used to fight about the television. She always wanted to play her Nintendo, and I wanted to watch MTV. She told on me finally, and my mom set limits. And I still haven’t forgotten that.”
Carol, a west suburban mother who asked that her last name not be used, knows about sibling conflict. She’s the mother of four sons, ages 9, 7, 5 and 8 months, and although she says they get along pretty well in general, the conflicts do arise, and for a variety of reasons.
“They yell at each other and argue, and there’s conflict when they’re playing together,” she says. “Say one kid wants to direct play. Or they fight over a toy. I see kids wanting something just because another kid has it. It’s a power thing. Or I think sometimes it’s jealousy.”
Jealousy, a need for attention, boredom or sometimes even a genuine dislike between parties can all be factors in sibling conflict. But regardless of the cause, they have one thing in common: They’re part of childhood.
“In many families, I think conflict with a sibling is part of their play,” says Dr. Susan McHale, a professor of human development and family studies at Penn State University. “It sometimes escalates into getting serious, and people get their feelings hurt and annoy their parents, and somebody might get physically hurt sometimes. But many times these fights are a form of growing up. They can’t practice on friends or their parents; a sibling is the only one you can get away with. It’s an unusual relationship.”
Dr. Linda Dunlap, chair of the psychiatry department at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., has studied the topic and agrees.
“Absolutely it’s part of growing up,” she says. “One of the things about fighting with siblings as opposed to friends, friends can walk away and say, `I’m done with you and I’ll never talk to you again.’ And parents and adults are powerful and you don’t dare challenge them.”
That leaves a sibling, just sitting there, an obvious target waiting to be slugged.
Kids learn quickly that there’s no surer way to get Dad or Mom’s attention than starting a fight, Dunlap says.
“If they’re good and no one pays attention, then they’ll misbehave,” she says. “If that’s all they can do to get attention, the child will misbehave.”
Dr. Carolyn Werneke, a family counselor in St. Charles, says she hasn’t seen a lot of sibling conflict in her practice. A former school psychologist who has worked with children for more than 25 years, she says that what she does see are cases of a child having a behavior problem that impacts the entire family. And, she says, the problem often can be traced to that search for attention.
“When I work with kids like that, I tell them they are in a pattern of accepting negative attention,” she says. “The kids get attention — and they don’t care if it’s negative.
“So what I try to teach them is how to get positive attention. I tell them, `You’re in a rut and you think accepting bad attention is OK. And it’s not OK.’ I tell them, `That’s how you fit in in your family. The other kid is seen as the good kid, you’re seen as the bad kid.'”
That can lead to another contributing factor, jealousy. If one child is constantly compared to a sibling — either blatantly, such as “Why can’t you be more like your brother?” or in more subtle ways, such as “Your brother was always so good at soccer” — conflict is going to arise.
Dunlap points out that someone who’s jealous doesn’t tell the other person of that jealousy; the resentment will show itself in other ways, such as sibling conflict. And parents, she says, need to be cautious they don’t escalate the jealousy by making comparisons. Instead, they should encourage each child to find his or her own strength.
Dunlap says she can relate to the jealousy issue.
“I have a brother who is so perfect I should hate him,” she says, laughing. “But he’s so good I can’t hate him. But I can see how a child could develop animosity.
“Jealousy [over a sibling’s success] sticks with you. That doesn’t mean you don’t like them or love them. At some level there may be a lifelong jealousy or competition, but it’s not a hateful one.”
Oftentimes, the fights are the result of boredom. Siblings spend a lot of time together, more than with their parents or with friends. And a lot of it is contact that’s not necessarily voluntarily. Kids are left home together, there’s nothing to do, a small disagreement escalates, and before you know it, someone has a bloody nose.
Yet another reason for the conflicts is the fact that, frankly, some children just aren’t very nice.
“Some kids seem to be more moody than others, just harder to get along with,” McHale says. “And if you have one of those in your sibling dyad, the kids are going to fight more. Simply because there’s a kid there who’s hard to get along with.”
What, then, can parents do to eliminate the quibbling and occasion mayhem?
Traditionally, there have been two theories on handling sibling fights. The first is that because it’s largely an effort to gain parental attention, parents who intervene are merely promoting such bad behavior. The second theory holds that parents should step in as a way of teaching their children rules about social behavior.
But a recent study by McHale found that neither is correct.
Her research indicated that parents were able to avoid getting involved in sibling fights because the siblings got along; it wasn’t the other way around, with kids getting along because their parents stayed out of their fights. As for parental intervention, “We found that parents who responded with threats and punishment could really get kids to fight a lot,” McHale says. “Threaten, punish, use harsh discipline strategies–they make the conflict worse.”
What McHale found was that the best way parents could create positive sibling relationships was to spend time with both siblings. In the study, of some 185 central Pennsylvania families over three years, researchers counted up the number of minutes the two siblings were together with one or both parents. That score predicted the high-positive, low-conflict relationships.
The two most common examples of parents and children spending time together were at meals and while watching television. But that wasn’t “quality” time and didn’t count. What really mattered was other periods of togetherness — at sporting events, school activities and religious services, for example.
“These are the ones scoring high as a family,” McHale says, “and those high scores were associated with positive sibling relationships.
“I think that doing mutually enjoyable things together can facilitate family ties and emotional bonds. When you’re sharing happy times, everyone has positive feelings. When you begin to associate that — the good times, not just raw time spent together — with members of your family, you have a better situation.”
Werneke suggests family meetings, which give people a chance to talk.
“Anything that causes people to communicate with each other when they’re not in conflict is good,” she says. “The patterns they establish on good days, in good times, are what carry them through conflicts. So it’s important to have a pattern established, whether family time or meetings.”
Dunlap agrees that parents have to work with their children to promote closeness.
“I tell them, `Today you must catch them being good 10 times. I don’t care how hard you have to look. Catch them being good and acknowledge them,'” she says.
“We don’t say `Thank you very much’ or `Have a great day.’ We do talk to them when they drive us nuts, though.”
Sometimes, however, exchanging pleasantries isn’t enough to stop the battling. In that case, Dunlap says, parents should step in.
“You have to forbid them from interacting,” she says. “If they’re fighting, tell them that they can’t have anything to do with each other for the next hour. The kids will think that’s great–for about 10 minutes. But then they’ll realize that having companionship is a lot more fun than being separated.
“If they’re fighting over the television, tell them, `If you can’t get along watching the television, no one watches it.’ You’d be surprised how quickly they stop fighting.”
In other words, the animosity they’re displaying may not be as deep as it would appear.
“I think that in most cases, I can say it’s not down and dirty and they don’t like each other,” says Dunlap.
“I think they’re very close. They depend upon each other,” Carol says of her sometimes-battling sons.
She says that as the boys have gotten older, she has been able to sit down with them and explain why they shouldn’t be fighting. Sometimes it even works.
“If I can get them to see what they’ve done [in terms of hurting a sibling’s feelings], they feel bad that they got angry and that they hurt somebody,” she says.
Everyone seems to agree that sibling conflicts are generally outgrown. Dunlap says that very few siblings in their adult years — she says the figure is maybe 5 percent — sever their bonds with their brothers and sisters. “I’m not going to tell you we’re all real close, but the vast majority report that if needed they would fly somewhere to help their sibling or let them live in their home,” she says. “They’d do just about anything for a sibling, and it’s based on love, not on obligation.
“Parents sometimes make way too much out of bickering,” Dunlap adds. “It’s normal. . . . In the long run, as long as the parents aren’t favoring one child over another or if one person doesn’t have such a bad personality that no one likes them, they’ll outgrow it.”
The Pecenco sisters certainly did after Barbi went off to college.
Christi, who was a year behind Barbi in school, went to work right after high school and still lived at home.
“I was stuck at home with my parents,” Christi says. “I was commuting four hours a day, I was exhausted. And I’d come home and listen to her [over the phone] talk about college issues — boys, friends, going out, classes. It was fun talking to her just to hear about what was going on outside our little town, where people were born, grew up, got married and stayed there.
“We always knew that wasn’t for us. We knew we were getting out. So I told her, `After college, pick someplace and we’re going.”‘
After Barbi graduated from college, she took a job in Chicago; Christi followed her there a couple of months later.
“We would go out together and hang out a lot,” Barbi says. “Then we became friends.”
Just over a year ago, Barbi found a better job in New York, separating the sisters once more. But now, says Christi, “I miss her; I wish she was still here. I miss her every day.”
