What Should I Tell My Siblings To Get Them To Work Harder? Practical Tips For Older Siblings And Caregivers
The coffee pot was still dripping last Saturday when my 16-year-old Lila cornered me by the fridge, voice tight with frustration. For the past month, she’s been in charge of her 12-year-old brother Javi and 10-year-old sister Mia’s summer school prep two days a week, while I finish my end-of-term duties as a 4th grade teacher’s aide. “I’ve tried everything,” she said, nodding toward the living room where Javi’s AirPods blared soccer highlights and Mia colored unicorn stickers over her reading log. “I tell them they need to work harder or they’ll fall behind next year. I threaten to take their phones. I even offered to pay them five dollars each to finish their work. Nothing sticks. What am I supposed to say to them?”
I nodded, because I’d been in her shoes. When I was 15, I spent half my afternoons nagging my 10-year-old little brother to finish his homework while my mom worked late. We’d end up screaming over his history textbook, he’d cram a half-finished paper together five minutes before she pulled in the driveway, and I’d storm to my room wondering why he just wouldn’t try harder. It took me years of working with kids and raising my own to figure out that the problem was never that they didn’t want to work. It was that everything I was saying was abstract, disconnected from anything they actually cared about.
I didn’t give Lila a big speech. I just gave her three specific things to try the next day, small shifts in what she says that take almost no extra effort. First, I told her, stop opening with “you need to work harder.” Start by naming something they want, right now, and tie the work to that. Instead of walking over and saying “put your phone down and do your math,” say something like “You need a B average to make that travel soccer team you’re trying out for, right? These eight problems are all you need to do today to stay on track for that. I’ll help you with the tricky ones if you get stuck.”
Second, break the work into one tiny, doable step instead of demanding the whole thing right now. Mia’s been avoiding her 10-entry reading log for weeks, claiming it’s too much. Instead of saying “you need to finish three entries this week,” tell her “all you have to do today is write one sentence about your book. That’s it. If you want to do more, great, but one is enough to check it off for today.”
Third, stop comparing their work to yours. I hear older siblings do this all the time: “I finished all my summer work the first week I was your age, why can’t you?” That just makes kids shut down. Instead, position yourself as on their team, not their boss. “I’ve got 20 minutes before I meet my friends anyway, let’s knock this out together so we can both go do what we want after.”
Lila rolled her eyes a little, said it sounded too easy, but agreed to try it. Two days later I came home from work to a surprisingly quiet house. Javi was at the kitchen table working on his math, and Mia was writing in her reading log. Lila pulled me aside afterward, half-surprised, and told me it had actually worked. She’d tried the line about the travel soccer team with Javi, and he’d actually put his phone down without arguing. “I told him once he finished, he could go to the park for pickup for two hours no hassle, and he just did it,” she said. With Mia, she’d asked her to write just one sentence about the pet cat in her book, and Mia had ended up writing three on her own, then went back to drawing without a fight.
It’s not perfect, of course. Day before yesterday, Javi still bailed on his worksheet to go play video games, and Mia cried that her sentence was “too stupid” and refused to write it. There’s still no magic line that makes every kid drop everything and buckle down. But what’s changed is that Lila doesn’t leave her afternoons with them feeling drained and angry anymore. The fights have almost stopped.
The thing that I’ve learned, both as a kid with a younger sibling and as a parent of three, is that “work harder” is a meaningless phrase to most kids. It sounds like a demand you’re making because you’re annoyed, or because you want something from them that they don’t care about. A 12-year-old doesn’t care about not falling behind in middle school, or getting into a good college in six years. They care about making the soccer team. They care about getting done with work so they can go draw or play with their friends. When you tie the small bit of work they need to do today to that thing, it stops feeling like a random punishment and starts feeling like a step toward something they want.
Most of the time, we don’t need big speeches or fancy rewards to get younger siblings to put in the work. We just need to stop talking about our goals for them and start talking about theirs, and stop asking for a whole week’s worth of work in one sitting. If a kid still refuses after that, you can just step back and let the natural consequence happen—they’ll have to cram it all in the last week of summer, or deal with a bad grade, and that’s a lesson they’ll learn better than any nagging. It’s not your job to force them to be perfect, it’s just your job to help them see why the work matters to them.
Last night, I walked past the kitchen and heard Lila say to Mia, “C’mon, just one sentence, then we can watch that TikTok of the rescue horses you wanted to show me.” Mia sighed, picked up her pencil, and wrote. It’s small, and it’s not always smooth, some days nothing works at all. But it’s working well enough for right now.
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