A father once asked Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen a question that sounds oddly specific until you realize almost every family with more than one child has lived some version of it: his seven- and eight-year-olds kept fighting over who got to hold their baby brother — pulling him back and forth between them — with no idea that the tug-of-war itself could send the baby crashing to the floor. No yelling, no hitting was allowed as a response. So how do you get through to them?
The instinct is to lecture: “Stop it, you’ll hurt him!” But an eight-year-old already believes the opposite — that loving something hard enough makes it safe. The words don’t match their model of the world, so the words don’t land.
What actually works is building a concrete, physical understanding rather than a verbal warning. Kelemen’s approach starts with the same principle that runs through all of his chinuch: don’t fight the love, work with it. The children aren’t being cruel — they’re competing to express affection. The job isn’t to shut down the impulse, it’s to redirect it into a form that can’t hurt anyone. Give each child an actual turn, timed, seated, with both hands underneath and a parent spotting — not as a punishment, but as “this is how big kids who really love the baby hold him.” Let holding the baby correctly become the status symbol, not holding him longest or first.
Underneath this small conflict is something bigger worth noticing: siblings that fight over a baby are, at bottom, fighting over connection — who gets to be close, who gets to matter to this new little person. That’s not a problem to eliminate. It’s raw material for teaching turn-taking, patience, and gentleness, three middos that don’t teach nearly as well in the abstract as they do with a real baby brother in the room.
Three steps for the week ahead:
1. Replace the warning (“you’ll hurt him!”) with a demonstration of the correct, safe way to hold — narrated, slow, hands-on.
2. Build a simple turn-taking structure so both children get guaranteed closeness, removing the scarcity that fuels the grabbing.
3. Praise the specific safe behavior out loud the moment you see it, so the “big kid” status gets attached to gentleness, not urgency.
Sibling conflict rarely needs a verdict. It usually just needs a better outlet.
For more of Rabbi Kelemen’s practical answers to the questions real parents actually ask, join the inner circle at lawerencekelemen.com.
This blog was co-written with Artificial Intelligence.