• A GUIDE TO FAMILY DYNAMICS •
Why does your child behave so differently around a sibling?
Some behaviors between siblings feel irrational, no matter how carefully parents respond. SLIP Psychology helps make sense of the pattern behind them.
The Key Discovery
After nearly 50 years of observation across four generations, psychologist Vera Rabie identified a consistent pattern: children experience parental love as something that must be competed for.
From the child’s perspective, behavior is not random; rather, it is a response to a perceived imbalance of love between siblings.
“Why am I acting this way?
Because you love my sibling more than me”
SLIP Psychology proposes that many behavioral problems are expressions of perceived inequality in parental love.
Not bad behavior
Parents often reward the child who behaves well and correct the child who acts out.
From an adult perspective, this is logical. From a child’s perspective, however, it communicates something different: the better-behaved sibling appears to receive more love.
Both children are therefore pursuing the same goal — reassurance of love — but through opposite behaviors.
About Vera Rabie, D.Psy.
Vera Rabie is a psychologist trained at McGill University and the University of Montreal, where she earned her Doctor of Psychology degree. Over the course of her career, she worked in mental health institutions, youth and adult correctional services, education, employee assistance programs, and private practice.
While raising her two daughters, she began closely observing everyday family interactions and children’s emotional responses to parental attention, approval, and discipline. She noticed that many behaviors adults interpret as disobedience or temperament followed a consistent emotional logic from the child’s point of view.
Over several decades, these observations developed into what she describes as the “Mind of a Child,” a framework explaining how children experience security, rivalry, and reassurance within the family. From this work emerged SLIP Psychology, a model proposing that both cooperative and disruptive behaviors often represent a child’s attempt to secure parental love and emotional certainty.
Her goal is to help parents better understand what their children are communicating through behavior and to reduce misunderstanding between the adult and child perspectives.
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