Family Matters 207adaptive way; such interactions may therefore have the
primary effect of fueling countless explosions.
Fortunately, Plan B can improve interactions among
siblings. Depending on their ages, it is often useful to
help brothers and sisters understand why their explosive
sibling acts the way he does, why his behavior is so dif-
ficult to change, how to interact with him in a way that
reduces hostility and minimizes the likelihood of aggres-
sion or explosions, and what the parents are actively do-
ing to try to improve things. Brothers and sisters tend to
be more receptive if there’s an improvement in the gen-
eral tone of family interactions and if the explosive sib-
ling is blowing up less often and becomes an active
participant in making things better.
Nonetheless, this understanding doesn’t always pre-
vent siblings from complaining about an apparent dou-
ble standard between themselves and their explosive
brother or sister. Armed with the knowledge that
parental attention is never distributed with 100 percent
parity and parental priorities are never exactly the same
for each child in any family, you should resist responding
to this complaint by trying even harder to get your ex-
plosive child to look like your other children. In all
families—yours and everyone else’s—fair does not mean
equal. Even parents in “ordinary” families often find
themselves providing one child with more help with
homework, having higher academic expectations for one