How to Handle Our Kids' Obsessive Jealousy

Respectful Parenting: Janet Lansbury Unruffled

JLML Press

Kids & Family, Parenting

4.7 • 3.8K Ratings

🗓️ 6 May 2025

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Bossiness. Toy taking. Unkind words. Hitting. Behaviors like these are particularly common between siblings but can happen with peers as well, and they're frustrating and disturbing for us to witness. How to we address them? Separate the warring factions? Issue a mandate? Negotiate a settlement? Perhaps just let it play out? In this episode, a parent writes that her four-year-old loves his 2.5-year-old sister dearly, but "he is insanely jealous, obsessed with having the same or more than her, whether it's food, toys, Easter eggs, crayons... It seemed like a phase, but it's become an obsession." This mom describes all the strategies she's tried to deal with her son's behavior, but to no avail. After considering the causes and conditions of this boy's behavior, Janet offers a respectful approach she believes help alleviate the situation for all.

Janet's "No Bad Kids Master Course" is available at NoBadKidsCourse.com.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Unruffled ad-free right now.
0:05.0	Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.
0:11.8	Hi, this is Janet Lansbury.
0:14.0	Welcome to Unruffled.
0:16.0	Today, I'm going to be responding to a parent who's worried about her son's obsessive jealousy.
0:24.4	He's jealous of his sibling.
0:27.0	And I'm going to offer her a few bits of feedback based on what she shared with me and
0:32.0	some ideas that I think will really help her and help her son.
0:36.6	But I just want to say that I'm really offering
0:39.5	one major suggestion here that will not only help with our children's rivalry when we have more
0:46.1	than one child and the older one often is having a hard time with the younger one and maybe not
0:52.5	treating them as we want them to. and it can be very distressing,
0:56.0	right? But this idea I'm going to share about also applies to almost every situation with
1:02.7	children because it's just something that we often forget to do and it's usually less than we
1:07.7	think we need to do. Maybe that's why we forget about it. It's like actually easier and simpler than the kinds of things that we try to do to help kids with
1:16.2	behaviors generally, where we want to empathize with them and comfort them, help them to feel
1:22.2	better when we've set a boundary or we might want to talk them out of something they're doing. And a lot of
1:30.8	these things, of course, we do reflexively, so we're not even thinking about it. But if we could
1:36.2	just simplify this for ourselves to this one idea, it can make everything so much clearer for
1:43.3	us and make it one step easier for us to stay calm
1:47.1	and centered in any situation with kids. Whether they're defying us in certain ways, whether we're
1:54.0	seeing them act out with their sibling in ways that we don't like, whether they're saying
	...

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