Sibling issues

[iamthattree]

Please tell me how you deal with warring siblings (twin 14 yr old dds in my case).

Otherwise lovely sweet girls to everyone else but awful to each other. Threatening, lying, shouting etc.

I've asked them how they think we should deal with it. Who's story should we believe etc. They won't answer (they are intelligent and emotionally literate kids with opinions on most things so I thought I'd put the ball in their court).

They are both anxious, dd2 especially and I do tend to be very mindful of this as we've had some fairly tricky episodes with her. I love bomb dd1 as I know her bad behaviour comes from her feeling insecure and perceiving that dd2 is the favourite.

But I am at the end of my tether. Dh is more black and white and just sees dd1 bullying her sister and doesn't see dd2 being manipulative which she really can be.

Could I sell them? Move out and live in a log cabin in the woods? Honestly it's really getting me down as they are lovely kids except to each other.

Do they have separate bedrooms, friends and classes at school ?

Yes to all. A tiny bit of friend overlap in that they are friendly with each others mates but 'best friends' are all separate.

We do have an issue with school in that dd1 is not in set 1 for science/maths (whereas dd2 is) and dd1s friends all are. This has baffled both her and her mates as her marks are generally the same or higher than her friends and she is consistently in the top 3 in class in science and averaging a 7/8 for both.

This has happened to dd1 a lot through school where she misses being in the class with her friends and she was looking forward to year 9 where they are formally put in ability sets as they all get the same level of marks/progress scores so were expecting to be together. Obviously I'm in touch with the school on this but we only found out after school ended on the last day so waiting on school to come back to me. But dd1 has been upset on and off over the hols. She doesn't care re being in set 2 at all, it's being separated yet again.....

It sounds like school have decided to keep the twins apart so even though one might be on the borderline for set 1 they keep her in set 2. Did you request they were in separate forms originally and this is a hangover from that?

@BadlydoneHelen we did in primary as dd2 was struggling with friends where dd1 was thriving and dd1 was feeling a bit of pressure as she was being academically compared to dd2 who is a bit stronger.

However we've never talked to secondary about it at all. They have a left/right streaming approach for yrs 7 and 8 and one was left, one was right. But that is meant to end in yr 9. Their head of house is aware of this though and is meant to be looking into it.

I don't doubt this is partially to blame for dd1s anxiety/bad behaviour but dd2 can't be her whipping boy.

I guess it can’t hurt to ask the school about the class.

Does coming down hard on them make a difference? Like taking phones away?

I wonder if the primary school passed the request on? it would be the sort of thing we pass on to secondary in transition meetings together with other info about who should be kept apart when deciding classes!