Conflict Snapshot

The Scenario: Your preteen daughter and young teenage son get into the name-calling like no one’s business. Idiot, stupid, you’ve heard them all. The name-calling generally degenerates into a fight. How can you conquer this?

The Solution: You can’t. Only the two of them can get a handle on this rivalry. One way to help them figure out how to stop fighting so much is to designate a small space in your home, such as a powder room, laundry room, or large closet, as the “conference” room. When the arguing commences, direct them to take it to the conference room for half an hour (set a timer). When the timer dings, ask them if they’ve solved the problem. Most of the time, they probably have. If not, then send them back in for another half hour.

This approach allows you to keep calm and them to discover that they can solve their own problems and will likely fight less, given they probably don’t want to spend thirty minutes in a small space with their sibling every time they argue.

Excerpted from Ending Sibling Rivalry: Moving Your Kids From War to Peace, available in October. Posted with permission of Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City. 

Conflict Resolution

Over the next several Tuesdays, I’m giving readers a sneak peak chapter-by-chapter at what’s inside my new book, Ending Sibling Rivalry: Moving Your Kids From War to Peace, which is available now, with permission of Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City.

Have you ever looked at your kids fighting and seen an opportunity for personal growth? Most parents don’t view tussles between their offspring as anything but disruptive and damaging to the family. However, teaching our children the proper and biblical way to handle conflict can restore peace to our homes and set our kids on the path to relationship success.

The temptation for parents is to skip the teaching part and simply move to making peace themselves, but that harms children by focusing on the why of the conflict and by taking the problem-solving part of the conflict away from the children. What parents all too easily forget is that children, because of their nature, disposition and age, are not civilized beings. That’s something that needs to be taught to a child, such as when we teach them to say “please” and “thank you.”

Some believe that children must be genetically disposed to fighting—after all, they do it so well!—but fail to realize that kids are equally equipped to make peace. That the ability to make up is essential to their emotional and mental development is often overlooked by parents. We can’t continually broker treaties between our children because then they don’t learn to do it for themselves and our cease-fires don’t last as long. Peace made by non-invested parties, i.e., parents, never sticks as well as harmony brought about by the warring parties.

Thus when parents get too involved in their children’s disputes, they rob the kids of a valuable learning experience. Yet it’s hard to resist that involvement. Parents do have a role to play in sibling conflict because parents shouldn’t leave the entire process to the children. Teaching kids how to peacefully resolve conflict is as important as letting them figure out the nitty-gritty details themselves.

Read more about how to teach your children conflict resolutions, as well as how parents can stay out of the process, in Ending Sibling Rivalry: Moving Your Kids From War to Peace, available now on Amazon.com, CBD.com and Beacon Hill Press.