89,000 things you need to know

Did you know you are likely to have had over 89,000 heated altercations with your closest relations before the age of eight? This extract from my first book might go some way to explain why we are all shouting at each other right now...

One of the most common observations about children without siblings is that they are worse at negotiating than children who grow up in larger families. The latter’s skills are honed by having to entice a brother or sister to share their Lego Star Wars Battle Cruiser, or swap the last green triangle in the Quality Street for one of those yellow toffee pennies that always get left in the tin (at least in my house).

The idea that people have varying degrees of such skills may suggest to you that we possess a kind of innate propensity for collaboration and compromise. Buried somewhere in all our strands of DNA, there’s a diplomacy gene. That would be the optimists’ view.

But for those of a less sunny outlook, it’s easy to contend that we have no instinct for conflict resolution at all. Any skills we do have are hard won – and need to be nurtured.

The life’s work of Laurie Kramer, Professor of Applied Psychology and Director of the University Honors Program at Northeastern University, Boston, seems to suggest that there is a need to nurture.

Kramer found that conflicts between young siblings (the 3–7 age group) arise at the phenomenal rate of 3.5 times an hour on average. Between those ages, the NHS recommends that kids need at least ten hours sleep every night. That leaves 14 free hours to have 49 disagreements every day – definitely not recommended by any health professional anywhere.

Extending the maths, 49 × 365 × 5 tops out at a whopping 89,425 opportunities to bruise a knuckle on a sibling’s face during those crucial formative years.

Happy families!

Extrapolate that over a whole childhood, and you get a lot of practice at having a barney. For me, this is evidence that backs up a growing suspicion of mine that we have a species-wide inclination to fall out over stuff; it comes naturally. We might even genuinely have a gene for it (we’ll explore that later), and worse, every one of us may possess genius levels of ability at being disagreeable.

Malcom Gladwell’s 2008 bestseller Outliers describes the factors behind the success of those people who make mortals like you and I feel inadequate: high achievers in fields like business, law, politics, science, sport and popular culture. Outliers introduced the world to the now famous 10,000-hour rule. This is the minimum benchmark level of practice ambitious individuals, hell-bent on world domination in a particular field of endeavour, need to invest in order to rise to glory. Gladwell famously did the maths on a broad sweep of luminaries, from Bill Gates to The Beatles, and found that they had all put in a 10,000-hour shift practising the things that later made them famous and/or rich. Annoyingly for us slackers, they had done so by the time they reached a very young age. In Gates’s case, before his 15th birthday. (Mum, if you’re reading this, I’m going to call you later to ask why the hell you didn’t drag me out of bed earlier in the day when I was a nipper!)

Now, keep the 10k rule front of mind and let’s return to Kramer. She contends that 3.5 sibling conflicts eat up around ten minutes in every hour. If that’s true, then this means – assuming they do actually get the recommended average of ten hours sleep – kids aged three to seven achieve 2.33 hours of meaningful practice during waking hours each and every day.

Doing yet more maths, the product of 2.33 × 365 × 5 (beginning at age three to end of age seven) is 4,252 hours. Not too far off halfway to 10,000. While no specific research has been undertaken on the frequency of sibling conflict in middle childhood, from age eight onwards, or in early adolescence, I have a sneaky feeling we can bridge the gap, and even surpass Gladwell’s rule, before we reach the age of 15. Here’s the why and how...

To read the rest AND find out how to better manage this sort of conflict...

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