Two Kids: Do They Fight More Or Play More? I Kept A Mental Count For A Week
It’s summer break, so my 7-year-old Mia and 4-year-old Jake are under my feet 24/7 right now. This morning I poured an iced latte at 8 a.m., and I just looked down at it 10 minutes ago — it’s warm and watery from sitting on the counter, just like most things around here. Last week at the neighborhood park coffee chat, Sarah asked me out of the blue, “Yours are 7 and 4, right? Do they play more or fight more?” And I just stared at her, half a blueberry muffin in my hand, crumbs falling on my sweatpants, and couldn’t answer. I mean, how do you answer that? So I decided I’d pay extra attention for a week, keep a little mental tally, see what the score was.
Monday started out promising. They were up at 6:30, which is way too early, but they didn’t come wake me up. I laid in bed for 20 extra minutes listening to them cackle over something in the playroom, counted that as one long play session, and felt pretty good about myself. By the time I pulled on socks and got to them, they were screaming over a T-Rex toy that Jake buried under Mia’s stuffed animal collection. Mia said it was hers anyway, Jake said she gave it to him for his birthday, which she did, but that doesn’t matter when you’re 4. That was fight one. By lunch on Monday, I had three fights and two play sessions logged in my head. It was already neck and neck.
The thing I never counted on when I started this little experiment: half the time I can’t even tell a real fight apart from rough play. Last Wednesday, I was on a work call for an hour, sitting at the dining table with my laptop, and all I heard was thumping and yelling from the living room. I kept mute on the call, fuming, because I’d asked them 10 times to keep it down. By the time the call ended, I marched in there ready to hand out time outs and take away screen time for the rest of the week, and found them wrestling on the rug, wrapped up in my favorite fuzzy throw blanket, pretending they were giant alligators. The yelling was just alligator roars. They looked up at me like I was the crazy one for interrupting. How do you count that? Is that play or pre-fight tension? It’s impossible to say.
Midweek we had the big Lego incident that really messed up my tally. Mia was building a replica of her Minecraft castle for a library contest, and she’d been working on it for two days. Jake wandered over, saw the empty gate spot, and stuck his favorite green dinosaur right there. Mia lost it. She pushed him, he fell back into a bin of Duplos, and he bit her forearm hard enough to leave a tiny purple bruise, nothing a unicorn band-aid couldn’t fix. I lost it too, right? Sent Mia to her room for pushing, Jake to the timeout stool, lectured both of them about being kind to each other. I was cleaning up scattered Duplos 10 minutes later, walking past the front hall, and heard them whispering behind the closed door. Mia was sneaking Jake a chocolate chip granola bar she’d stashed in her backpack from camp, and Jake was saying he was sorry he bit her, and Mia said it was okay, the dinosaur actually looked cool anyway, but don’t tell mom I said that. Then they both laughed about how I get way too mad when they fight. I just walked away, didn’t say anything. How do I count that? It started as a fight, turned into a secret alliance against me before the timeout even ended.
By Sunday night, my mental tally was a total mess. I had 19 fights marked down, but 14 of them were over before I even got up from whatever I was doing to intervene. Most of the longer play sessions got cut short by a fight over a turn or a sticker or who gets to stand closest to me at the sink. If I counted total minutes instead of episodes, I think they spent way more time playing than fighting, but the fighting is louder, right? It sticks in your brain more. You forget the 45 minutes they spent catching tadpoles in the creek down the street, because you’re still replaying the 2 minute fight over who got the bigger popsicle.
I’ve noticed one small thing that’s changed for me, though, since I started paying attention. I used to sprint in the second I heard raised voices, break it up, assign blame, force them to apologize before anyone could move on. Now I just wait a minute, most of the time. I still go running if someone’s screaming bloody murder, obviously — I don’t let them hurt each other bad. But the fights over who gets to hold the TV remote, or who sat in the right seat on the couch? 9 times out of 10, they work it out faster than I can get there. And half the time, the fight was just a way to get my attention anyway. As soon as I don’t give it, they move on back to playing.
Sarah asked me again this morning at drop off for Jake’s half-day camp. She said, “So did you figure it out? Fight or play?” I just laughed and shook my head. I don’t have the answer. Some days I go to bed at night thinking all they do is fight, and I must be doing this whole two-kid thing wrong. Other days I catch them through the kitchen window, Mia helping Jake tie his sneakers, or Jake bringing Mia a yellow dandelion he picked just because she likes yellow, and my chest feels so full I can barely breathe. It’s never all one or all the other. It’s just mixed up, messy, all the time.
Right now, as I’m typing this, they’re sitting at the kitchen table fighting over the only blue marker. I just dug another blue marker out of the junk drawer and set it between them. Ten minutes from now, they’ll be dragging all the couch cushions into the middle of the living room to build a slide, and they’ll forget they ever fought about a marker. I still don’t know which one they do more. I don’t think it matters anyway, not really.
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