Separation Snapshot

The Scenario: Your two daughters ages eight and six play together nicely, but when their two cousins who are similar ages come over, it’s bedlam. Within half an hour, your youngest will be crying over being excluded by her older sister from the games or play. You constantly have to intervene to keep any semblance of peace. What can you do?

The Solution: In this case, ignoring the problem or letting the children figure it out themselves is not likely to work. Things have gone on too far and their “positions” have become so entrenched that they can’t change on their own. Nor can you act as mediator—you’ve seen how successful that’s been!

Here’s a way to handle this. The next time the cousins are scheduled to come over, have your sons draw straws or flip a coin to determine which one of them will get to play with the cousins. The other child will stay away from the cousins and get her turn next time it’s playtime with the cousins.

You’ll likely have to do this for the next four or so times the cousins are at your house before you can ask your two daughters if one of them needs to play separately from the rest. This puts the onus of figuring out how to get along on the shoulders if your daughters, where it belongs.

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 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. 

Competition Snapshot

The Scenario: Your six-year-old daughter doesn’t want to try anything because her older siblings—a seven-year-old brother and an eight-year-old sister—excel at everything they do. The older siblings receive numerous compliments for their “amazing” abilities, particularly in sports. Now the six-year-old wants nothing to do with physical activities. What can we do to encourage her participation?

The Solution: Stop asking her. Counter-intuitive? Perhaps, but pushing her to do sports is likely not to help the situation. Ask her—when her siblings are not around—what activities she’d like to try. Then see if there’s a class or group in which she, and she alone, could become involved. Don’t allow her siblings to attend the class or group; let her have this all to herself.

Then to lower competition in your home, don’t talk so much in a family setting about how well the older sibs are doing. Ask different questions about their sports that change the focus from them to someone else, such as “Who did you think played well today?”

Also make sure you’re not contributing to the competitive atmosphere by praising your older children too much. This should help your younger daughter find her own special place and also help your older children realize it’s not all about them and their “amazing” abilities.

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.

Barking Kids

Q: My 7-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son constantly argue and pick at each other. This has been going on for several months now! I do my best to leave them alone to work it out themselves, but the constant bickering is driving me crazy. What can I do to stop the sniping?

A: Read my book on sibling rivalry! Sorry, couldn’t resist a shameless plug (Ending Sibling Rivalry comes out in October).

Image courtesy of Liz Noffsinger/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Now on to your question. When you have sibling conflict in your house, it can feel nonstop at times. With school out, it might be a matter of too much togetherness. There’s a reason the old adage, “Familiarity breeds contempt,” is true.

Give your kids some time apart and that should help to alleviate the discord. Set time during the morning and afternoon when the children play separately for a half hour or so. Set a timer if you have to, but make sure they are in different areas of the house, or one inside, one outside.

Bickering has probably become a habit, so they might still do a lot of it when together, even if they’re not really fighting. Try the Ticket system to cut down on this. Give them three tickets together each day. Every time they bicker (and define clearly what you mean), they lose a ticket. When all tickets are gone, they spend the rest of the day in their rooms and go to bed directly after supper. It takes two to snipe, so both should receive the same punishment.

The combination of separating the kids and implementing a joint ticket system should lower the bickering in your household. You won’t eliminate it entirely because kids aren’t perfect, but you should be able to help them break the habit of the way they intereact.

Email Sarah if you have a parenting question you would like to see answered on this blog.