Siblings without Rivalry

Yesterday I finished Siblings without Rivalry: How to Help Your Children Live Together So You Can Live Too by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish. It's a pretty useful guide to avoiding some of the common pratfalls of parenting more than one child. My brother and I didn't actually fight very much as kids; from the get-go we were allies "against" our parents, so the cardinal assumption of the book -- that your kids will be at each other's throats -- made it hard for me to relate to the text at first; however, when I stopped to remember that the vehicle for telling the book's "story" is a series of help sessions for parents whose children are fighting... okay, I can get behind that. The book's strength lies in its relative simplicity, so I won't dwell on the fact that it doesn't delve far into some of the subtleties and gray areas (and to their credit, the authors willingly admit this) except for one issue that, as I read it, comes close to being an internal inconsistency, and really needed to be resolved within the book.

At any rate, later in the book is a section on roles, and how parents will create roles for children, other children will create roles for children, and children will create roles for themselves... and how it isn't healthy for your children's relationships for their to be a "smart" one, "athletic" one, and "musical" one; they should all be equally encouraged to be smart and athletic and musical -- the problem here is that there is an earlier chapter on how damaging it can be to try to treat your kids equally; for example, when they ask "who do you love best?" you don't answer "I love all of you equally," you tell them how you love them individually. There is a fine line here between not putting your kids into roles and not trying to treat them perfectly equally.

Based upon my first reading (and having returned the book to the library, I can't go back for a second reading right now, so the problem might not be there), it needs to be clarified in the section on roles that your children should all be encouraged to be as smart and athletic and musical as they can individually be, to make there be a connection between these lessons/sessions rather than a near-inconsistency.