Play with siblings
Playing together means negotiating rules, taking turns and sometimes losing without everything falling apart. That is a lot to manage at once, and the road from laughter to quarrel is short. The visual support below makes the rules visible before the play even starts.
♀Sharing a ball
Three children playing together and holding a red ball
♀Playing together
Three children happily playing together with a ball and a frisbee
About this visual support
It almost always starts well. Then one wants to go first, the other calls it cheating, and a minute later someone is crying. Play between siblings is one of the most demanding social situations a child meets, because it asks them to read another person, give and take, and hold back their own will in the moment, all at once.
A visual support can lower the temperature by moving the rules outside the children. When the turn order and what counts sit on a picture, it is no longer one child's word against the other's but something both can point to. The fight over whose turn it is becomes a glance at the picture instead of a power struggle. That small shift, from person to picture, is often enough to keep the play going.
One tip just for sibling play: decide together beforehand what happens when someone loses, with its own picture, so the disappointment has somewhere to go. Then losing becomes part of the game rather than a breakdown. In Routined you can make simple turn-taking schedules both children can see, with fourteen days free to try. The images below also print well to lay between the children during play.