On a good day, we have about fifteen minutes of peace after TR gets home from school before he and SW are arguing about something. Today wasn’t a good day, so it was more along the lines of five minutes.

I wonder just what it is that makes them so argumentative with each other. I think that V and I set a slightly better example for them than that - not that we don’t have our disagreements, but it’s more along the lines of a few times a month than a few times a day. We try to model disagreement settling behaviors, methods for stepping back and keeping things in perspective, and ways to avoid conflict to begin with. We spend a lot of time teaching them to walk away from each other or not let the other’s words have too much power. I simply can’t seem to explain to TR that I won’t ground him just because SW says to. As a matter of fact, grounding isn’t part of our discipline routine at all so I’m not sure why it’s such a source of frustration for him.

I guess it’s a function of being brothers, or teenage brothers perhaps. I don’t remember quite this much strife between my two brothers growing up, but I had a different perspective then and less emotional investment in how they behaved. I do know for certain that a great deal of it is simply the frustration of living with a sibling with Autism. TR has a lot to put up with on that one, and he’s doing it with his own case of Bi-Polar disorder.

RM is sometimes our two-year-old comic relief in some of these situations. She will walk in a room and join the battle, babbling a string of non-sensical syllables and shaking her little fist. As her language is developing, so are her interventions. Today I told her to tell them not to fight. So she walks in the room, and says “Boys, fight.” That got a laugh at least.

For all their arguing though, it usually takes just as short a period of time before one has to share some amazing fact or exciting bit of news or great idea with the other.

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I just stepped away for a moment here to break up another disagreement over the best way to perform some sort of maneuver in a video game. I told them someone needed to step out to another room right now. But it was RM who said “OK” and headed down the hall.