Your Children Stopped Fighting. They Still Aren’t Close.
You Cannot Install Love Between Your Children
One-sentence summary: Parents measure the sibling relationship by how little their children fight, but a randomised trial found that reducing conflict and growing affection are two different projects, and only one of them responds to the work most households are doing.
There is a particular evening that unsettles parents more than the loud ones.
Nothing happens. The children play in separate corners without incident, eat without complaint, go up without a standoff at the stairs. The house is calm from six until eight. And somewhere in that calm a thought arrives that the parent does not say out loud, because saying it would sound ungrateful.
They are not fighting. They are also not together.
I have heard versions of that sentence from more parents than I expected. It arrives sideways, usually at the end of a conversation about something else. The worry underneath it has nothing to do with noise. It has to do with twenty years from now, and whether two people who shared a bathroom for a decade will bother to ring each other.
That worry deserves a better answer than it usually gets.
An experiment that did not go as planned
In 2023 a team at the University of Queensland published something that ought to have changed how parents think about this, and mostly did not, because its finding is inconvenient.
They recruited 74 families. Every one of them had come forward for the same reason: the parents were worried about how much their children fought. Thirty-seven families were given a short group programme built specifically to address sibling conflict. The other thirty-seven were put on a waiting list [1].
Then the researchers measured what happened.
Warmth between the siblings rose in the families who attended. So did the emotional wellbeing of one child in each of those households. Both of those are real, measurable gains, and any parent would take them.
The conflict itself did not significantly move.
The authors did not bury this. Their own reading was that the warm side and the hostile side of a sibling bond might each need working on in their own right [1]. Which is a careful academic way of saying: these are two different jobs, and you cannot get the second by doing the first.
The translation error
Almost every household runs on an unspoken equation. Fewer arguments equals a better relationship. Drive the arguing down far enough and something warmer will grow in the space you cleared.
It is an understandable equation. It is also a translation error, and once you see it you cannot unsee it in your own family.
Think about the adults you know. Somewhere in your extended family there are two cousins who spent their entire childhood at each other’s throats and now speak most weeks. And somewhere else there are two who never once raised their voices and have not been alone in a room together since a funeral.
Absence of friction does not generate affection. Affection is built out of specific good things that happened between two people, and a household can produce almost none of them while being perfectly peaceful.
So the honest question is not whether your children argue. It is what you have been growing in the hours when they are not arguing.
Why the arguing resists you anyway
Before the second job, the first one deserves an explanation, because parents tend to read their children’s persistence as defiance when it is nothing of the sort. Four forces are holding that conflict in place, and none of them is stubbornness.
They are copying, constantly
Conflict gets absorbed before it is ever taught. Children pick up the shape of disagreement from the adults around them the way they pick up an accent, without instruction and without being aware it is happening.
A child who watches an adult drop their voice, listen properly, check what actually happened, and return to a subject an hour later has been handed a working method. A child who watches a door slam has also been handed one.
They are running a fairness ledger
Spend half a minute listening to a sibling argument and one word rises above everything else. Fair.
This is not pettiness, and the evidence here is uncomfortable to read as a parent. Researchers pooling studies on uneven treatment inside families found that where one child receives more warmth, or another receives more harshness, the gap registers in both children’s internalising and externalising difficulties [2]. The row over the bigger slice was never about the slice. It was about what the slice appeared to prove.
Which is why the most damaging sentence in most households is delivered as encouragement. “Why can’t you sit nicely like your sister” is heard by both children as a ranking, and by the sister as a job she now has to keep.
Justice between children has never meant giving them identical things. A four-year-old and a ten-year-old need different bedtimes, different portions, different amounts of help getting through wudu. What justice means is that neither child can assemble a case that they are the one who matters less.
They came pre-configured
One child lets go of a grievance inside a minute. The other holds it for an hour and brings it back at bedtime, fully formed, with supporting evidence.
A research team working from temperament has traced how both the shapes aggression takes and the purposes it serves develop across the early years [3]. Anyone raising two children already knows the practical version of this finding: identical provocation, two completely unlike reactions, neither of them selected by the child.
Their equipment is unfinished
Ending a dispute asks a great deal of a small brain. A child has to keep hold of what they want, construct a model of what the other person wants, weigh the two, and then produce a response other than the one their body is offering.
That final move draws on impulse control, working memory and the ability to change direction mid-thought. None of the three is finished in a young child, and all three are still under construction well into the middle years [4]. Pooled evidence on aggression and theory of mind, meaning a child’s grasp that another head holds a different version of the same afternoon, shows the two travelling together [5]. A boy who cannot yet carry his sister’s account alongside his own will defend his own with every resource he has.
Put those four together and you have a situation that will not yield to willpower, yours or theirs.
The habit that quietly makes it worse
Most parents have a default question they reach for when they arrive mid-argument. Three words.
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Who started it?
It sounds like fairness. It functions as training. Ask it enough times and you produce two children who have become skilled at assembling a case for themselves and remain helpless at solving a problem together.
A better question sits right beside it. Ask each child what they were after, rather than who moved first. Then pass the thing back to them and ask what a fair outcome would look like. A review mapping the field of sibling conflict management across childhood and adolescence charts how the strategies available to children change as they develop [6]. That change arrives only in households where somebody is occasionally allowed to try.
There is a second default worth naming, and it is common enough in Muslim homes that saying nothing would be dishonest.
Smacking.
One study set out to unpick which family conditions turn smacking into more aggression rather than less [7]. American paediatricians, through their national body, hold a flat line on the question: no physical punishment in any form, and no shouting or humiliation either, since the immediate return is negligible and the later bill is not [8]. Being struck raises the odds that a child strikes the person nearest to hand, and that person sleeps in the next bed. Whatever is said alongside the smack, that is the part which transmits.
There is a narration that sits awkwardly and usefully here. Abu Mas’ud al-Ansari described striking a servant of his and hearing a voice behind him: Allah has more power over you than you have over him. He turned, and the Messenger of Allah ﷺ was standing there [9].
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The narration concerns a servant, not a child, and the honest thing is to say so rather than stretch the text to fit a parenting article. What it states is a principle about power exercised over someone who has no capacity to resist it. Every household with a small child in it contains that asymmetry, all day, every day.
The hours are doing more than the children are
Here is something you can verify yourself inside a week.
Note the time whenever an argument starts. Change nothing else. By day seven, most households find that three or four stretches of the day are producing nearly all the trouble, and that they are the same stretches every time.
The hour before the evening meal, when everyone is hungry and both adults are occupied. The scramble to leave the house. Any car trip long enough to get boring. Empty time with nothing arranged and one contested object within reach. And the stretch immediately after school, when a child who has been holding themselves upright since nine in the morning finally lets go, with only a sibling in range.
None of that is about who your children are. It is about what has run out, and what has run out is the one variable a parent can refill directly.
Feed them sooner. Take the contested object out of the equation before anyone gets in the car, instead of wrestling it off someone at seventy miles an hour. Hand each child a different job in the hour before the meal, and put them in different rooms to do it if the house allows. Have the argument about shoes the night before, when nobody is late.
None of this is impressive. All of it works better than anything available to you once the shouting has started.
The second job, which nobody assigns you
Which returns us to the thing the trial actually shifted.
Warmth between siblings is not built through bonding activities or family meetings. It accumulates through small, repeated, almost invisible acts, and three of them cost a parent nothing but attention.
Speak each child up to the other one. Separately, and specifically. Not “your sister is kind,” which lands as nothing, but “your brother waited at the gate for you when his friends had already gone ahead.” Children assemble their picture of a sibling partly out of what the adults around them say about that sibling. In most homes, almost everything a child hears from a parent about their brother or sister is corrective. Changing that ratio requires neither child to change at all.
Give them work rather than play. Two children and one toy is a competition. Two children folding laundry, kneading dough, or setting a room up for guests are positioned on the same side of a problem. The cooperation happens without anyone having to be generous, which matters, because generosity is the hardest thing to demand.
Exempt a few things from sharing entirely. Three possessions per child, permanently protected, enforced without negotiation. A child who knows that three things are safe stops treating every other object as a territory to be defended.
And the arguments are not wasted time either. A study that set out to unpack what siblings do to each other mid-disagreement concluded that the exchange itself is a developmental force, not background noise around one [10]. Negotiation. Holding a position without demolishing the person opposite. Reading a face across a table and adjusting. Those get rehearsed at low stakes, with somebody who will still be in the house tomorrow.
There is a reason the relayed compliment does more work than praising a child directly. Praise delivered to a child’s face is information about themselves, which they will discount. The same sentence delivered about them, to their sibling, is information about the relationship, and neither child can discount it because neither one was being managed.
The part that was never yours
Every parent who takes this seriously reaches the same wall eventually.
You can write the rules, coach the apology, intervene before someone gets hurt, notice every repair out loud for years. What you cannot do is open one child and place affection for the other inside them. That has occurred to most parents at some point, usually late at night, usually framed as personal failure.
It is not failure. It is a category error about whose work that part is.
Allah says of the believers: “And He brought their hearts together. If you had spent all that is in the earth, you could not have brought their hearts together, but Allah brought them together” [11].
Tafsir Ibn Kathir explains what that describes. The Aws and the Khazraj were two clans of Madinah with a history of war between them going back years, and many standing reasons to keep it going. He writes that the wealth of the entire earth could not have joined those hearts, because of the enmity and hatred already sitting there, and that Allah ended all of it [11].
The verse addresses the believing community rather than brothers and sisters sharing a bedroom, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest scholarship. The principle it states holds anywhere. Warmth between two people who have hurt one another is given. It is not manufactured, and no amount of parental effort has ever manufactured it.
What stays on the human side of the line is worth doing well. The Prophet ﷺ said that the one who makes peace between people, conveying good or saying good, is not a liar [12]. Imam al-Bukhari filed that narration under Peacemaking in his collection, which tells you plainly how he read it. Carrying a kind word across a gap between two people who are not currently speaking well has a name in Islam, and that name is not deception.
Which means the small act described a few paragraphs above, telling one child something good about the other, is not merely a technique borrowed from a trial in Queensland. It has been named and commended for fourteen centuries.
Do the human half. Ask for the rest.
Where this stops being ordinary
Almost all of this eases as children grow. A long study of how sibling intimacy and sibling conflict move from the middle childhood years into young adulthood shows both of them changing, at different rates and not always in opposite directions, as two people who are themselves still forming keep renegotiating what they are to each other [13]. Household volume at seven predicts remarkably little about the relationship at thirty.
Some of it does not ease, though, and a parent deserves a line rather than reassurance.
Physical aggression that keeps recurring. Threats. Intimidation. Humiliation delivered on purpose. Possessions broken deliberately. Or one child who has become afraid of the other in the place they both live.
Public health researchers describe this as a problem that is everywhere and almost never named, largely because households file it under ordinary sibling behaviour [14]. Take it to your doctor, or a paediatrician, or a counsellor who works with families, and take it earlier than feels necessary. Reaching for the means Allah has provided has never been the opposite of tawakkul.
What to do with all this tonight
Stop grading your household on how quiet it was.
Then find whichever child is nearest and tell them one true, specific thing their sibling did well today. Ten seconds. No explanation of why you said it, no follow-up question, nothing to make it a lesson.
That is the whole of it. Tomorrow, do it again with the other one.
The arguing will carry on for a few more years, because their equipment is not finished and mostly they are not choosing it. What changes is what is quietly accumulating underneath the noise, and whether, three decades from now, two adults who once fought over a toy car pick up the phone for no particular reason.
References
[1] Pickering, J.A., Crane, M.E., Hong, J., Nickel, A-K., Chainey, C., & Sanders, M.R. (2023). A randomized controlled trial of a parenting program to improve sibling relationships. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 32(5), 1438–1451. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-023-02539-7
[2] Eradus, M., Leijten, P., Melendez-Torres, G.J., Foo, X.Q., & Oliver, B.R. (2024). Parental differential warmth, hostility, and sibling differences in internalizing and externalizing behavior problems: A meta-analysis. Journal of Family Psychology, 38(3), 387–399. https://doi.org/10.1037/fam0001194
[3] Ostrov, J.M., Murray-Close, D., Perry, K.J., Blakely-McClure, S.J., Perhamus, G.R., Mutignani, L.M., Kesselring, S., Memba, G.V., & Probst, S. (2023). The development of forms and functions of aggression during early childhood: A temperament-based approach. Development and Psychopathology, 35(2), 941–957. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579422000177
[4] Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. A Guide to Executive Function. https://developingchild.harvard.edu/resource-guides/guide-executive-function/
[5] Wang, Y., Shang, S., Xie, W., Hong, S., Liu, Z., & Su, Y. (2023). The relation between aggression and theory of mind in children: A meta-analysis. Developmental Science, 26(2), Article e13310. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13310
[6] Holmes, M.R., Johnson, L.R., O’Donnell, K.A., & Nunnery, A. (2026). Sibling conflict management in childhood and adolescence: A scoping review to inform developmental research and theory. Developmental Review, 80, Article 101267. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2026.101267
[7] Peets, K., Hodges, E.V.E., & Kikas, E. (2022). Unravelling the parent-child contexts in which corporal punishment predicts increases vs. decreases in children’s aggression. Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, 51(2), 183–194. https://doi.org/10.1080/15374416.2021.1907753
[8] Sege, R.D., Siegel, B.S., AAP Council on Child Abuse and Neglect, & AAP Committee on Psychosocial Aspects of Child and Family Health. (2018). Effective Discipline to Raise Healthy Children. Pediatrics, 142(6), e20183112. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2018-3112
[9] Sahih Muslim 1659, narrated by Abu Mas’ud al-Ansari. Graded Sahih. https://sunnah.com/muslim:1659
[10] Borairi, S., Plamondon, A., Rodrigues, M., Sokolovic, N., Perlman, M., & Jenkins, J. (2023). Do siblings influence one another? Unpacking processes that occur during sibling conflict. Child Development, 94(1), 110–125. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13842
[11] Qur’an, Surah Al-Anfal 8:63, with Tafsir Ibn Kathir. https://quran.com/en/8:63
[12] Sahih al-Bukhari 2692, narrated by Umm Kulthum bint ‘Uqba. Kitab as-Sulh (Peacemaking). Graded Sahih. https://sunnah.com/bukhari:2692
[13] McHale, S.M., Sun, X., Updegraff, K.A., & Whiteman, S.D. (2026). Patterns and correlates of changes in sibling intimacy and conflict from middle childhood through young adulthood. Developmental Psychology, 62(3), 665–677. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001750
[14] Tucker, C.J., Whitworth, T.R., & Perkins, N.H. (2025). Sibling aggression and abuse: Invisible and widespread public health problems. American Journal of Public Health, 115(9), 1383–1387. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2024.307983
We combine scientific research with Qur’an and authentic Sunnah, and we cite our sources. Even so, this is general guidance and no substitute for a doctor who can examine your child.
