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Speaker 2Not to Screw Up Your Kids podcast. So, pour yourself a cuppa, find a comfy seat and enjoy the conversation. Today's episode, five hacks to help siblings get along. I want to address the sibling conflict scenarios that we all get because it's all normal and it is all natural. But I want to tackle a couple of them. I want to tackle it from a different approach. So, rather than how do we deal with it in the moment, how do we deal with it generally, I want us to take a slightly more proactive approach that looks at ways that we can actually encourage, anticipate and put together things within our home and our family that might set our children up for the greatest possible success in terms of them being able to get along. So, I'm going to share five. Five hacks and one specific hack that applies to every single one. So, let's get started. The first is about creating opportunities for whole family time. If we sort of consider the sibling dynamic and the challenges around siblings cooperating and getting on, we want to find ways of helping them experience firsthand some positive, some helpful, some joyful, some enjoyable interactions. So, when we're thinking about whole family times, whole family activities, whole family outings or trips, whatever those might be, I kind of want us to look at it in a slightly different way in terms of our thinking of like, what opportunities have I got? What things could I put in place for us to do all together as a family, which kind of can build that connection between them? So, there's. So, there's. There's that element of that cooperation. So, what we're doing is it's about enjoying something that you all do together. Now, if you currently have real battles between siblings, you might want to be mindful initially when you're choosing family activities, just for a little bit, to get everyone on board. So, for example, there may well be some activities that you currently do that maybe one or two of the children really love, but one. One of them doesn't or one will tolerate, one absolutely 100% won't tolerate and one really loves it. What you're really trying to do is create this connection between the siblings as well as the family. And that can go both ways. So, it can be doing activities or enjoying something that all your children will be prepared to have a go at, but it can actually work in the opposite. And actually what happens is when we think about it from. The psychology of building teams, for example, it's having something about a shared experience, but it can also. You can build a really strong team by a common foe, which can be us. So, if all of your children hate going for a walk and they're all complaining and they all don't want to do it, then that activity can work just as well on that basis that they have a common enemy, which is us, making them go for that walk. And so, that can build that connection. So, it's not about necessarily. changing anything drastically, but if you are currently in a scenario where you have got siblings that seem to be at each other's throats all of the time, sometimes it can feel almost counterintuitive to try and bring them all together so that we can do something as a family together. When in fact, if we choose with some forethought and some consideration, there are some things that we can insist on that we do as a whole family that will then build that connection. And once we've got that connection, we can then continue with that family time, but in scenarios where we may well have to kind of work around some siblings finding that activity okay and others not. So, that's the first thing I would do is really consider how you can create opportunities for whole family time. There'll be a theme around family stuff that we'll talk about as well. The second, and this is quite a big one, so I'm going to spend a bit of time talking about this, is creating special time. Once a week for each child. And you can call it special time. I would encourage you to do that. It's that special mummy time, special daddy time, special whatever. But special time I think is good. And keep this time the same for each of your children. Now, let me address the equal time issue here. Because for those of you who are regular listeners to the podcast, you will know that I talk a lot about. the fact that we should not be making everything equal. But in this particular scenario, when we're talking about special time once a week, it ought to be the same time for each child each week. Now, each child we have generally has a different requirement from us as they navigate their different ages and stages of development. So, it is just a natural part. So, in our day-to-day interactions, it is impossible and I would say something that I would not encourage you to try to even out time-wise. Park that, that's a different, you know, this special time is completely different to the way that we work interactions and on our day-to-day. So, let me explain to see if I can make it easier to understand. So, let's say you currently have three children. You have a two-year-old, a five-year-old, and a nine-year-old. Now, if we consider each one in turn, now the youngest two-year-old is probably going to require a lot more time from you when it comes to getting dressed, eating their meals, getting ready to go out, bathing, getting ready for bed, potentially going down for a nap or not going down for a nap, that you may well be spending more time toileting them. And that could be either because they're independently doing it and we've all been there, that two-year-old or two-and-a-half-year-old or three-year-old, when they need to go to the loo, we down tools and we take them because we want to make sure that they're, you know, the two-year-old that you're, it's toileting that requires a lot of time. They can't just independently go on their own. Or we're still working through and so we've got nappy changing or, you know, that transition. Our two-year-old is also likely to still be learning, although this is a lifelong journey for most children and adults, but still be learning to manage those big emotions. So, we might find that we spend quite a bit of time helping them manage frustrations maybe with something that they're playing with or something that they can't do and that's even without their sibling's involvement. So, that's our two-year-old, for example, just giving you some possibles as to why, time-wise, that already may well be disproportionately biased towards your two-year-old. Our nine-year-old, however, if we look at it at the other extreme, is perfectly capable of getting dressed in the morning, brushing their teeth, feeding themselves, not talking about them getting their own food and sitting in isolation, but they're able to sit at a table and, you know, pick up cutlery and feed themselves. They're capable of putting their shoes on when we have to go out. They potentially, in your household, may even be having a bath or a shower independently. They are possibly more able of self-soothing or entertaining themselves independently for extended periods of time, which our two-year-old can't. Now, I will caveat this, of course, because there is a difference between they are likely to be perfectly capable and then actually doing what we ask each time, but that's a whole other podcast episode. And our five-year-old may well sit somewhere in the middle of there, or it may well be that there are certain aspects that they require more time than our two-year-old in or more time than our nine-year-old or less time. So it's all ages and stages, but it's just to give you a bit of an idea there. You can substitute the ages of your children for any age, and you will see, that as our children go through certain ages and stages, they just require more time. I mean, I could have put a 16-year-old in there who's getting really worried about exams or is having some real challenges around friendships or is managing their whole self-esteem and confidence. So that might pull you between your two-year-old and your 16-year-old, and then it's the nine-year-old that is getting the very little amount of time. It's all sorts of different dynamics. So when we're dealing with our children, it is impossible to apportion time equally. It's much more about apportioning need, but the special time is special. You know, it has a very different exceptions to the rules, and that is by keeping it unique and the same for each child. So I would recommend that this special time, 20 minutes to 30 minutes, I think is enough. Well, I would recommend that 20 to 30 minutes is, more more than adequate. I'm not trying to layer on yet more things for you to feel guilty about or to beat yourself up with. If you can manage 10 minutes, fantastic, do 10 minutes. It is all about the quality of it. And let me explain a little bit more how this can be really helpful from the perspective of recognizing the individual needs of each of our children, which means because they get that, what then happens is when they are together, they feel heard and seen from you in their own special time that you get less of that conflict playing out in their interactions. And instead, any conflict that they have is a natural normal conflict over the situation that they're in, whether that's sharing the remote control, whether that's sharing a toy, whether that's sharing the trampoline, because it's very specific to that situation. Quite often when we look at conflicts between siblings, you layer up a whole other aspect of feeling that they're lost in the dynamics of the family or that everyone always takes the other person's side when we're resolving conflicts. So by proactively giving them this special time, we mitigate and we offset that being one of the factors that amplifies the explosive nature of the conflict that our children have. So let's go back to equal special time. So I would recommend that this is child-led. In other words, you are doing something your child chooses. So no negotiating. You're not, this isn't, you know, mommy says, daddy says, absolutely. It's what does your child do? What does your child want to do? Because the goal here is connection. And this happens best when it's on our children's terms. So the rules of the game, when it comes down to it, the rules of the game, the rules of the game, comes to special time is your child chooses, you fully engage. So no mobiles, no devices, no mental to-do lists in your head, no distractions. You actively listen, which is all about listening to understand. So I'm going to give you some examples here, and I'm actually going to give you a bit of an exercise that I want, I would really encourage you to practice. And it's about practicing to repeat back the last two sentences. So I'm going to give you a bit of an exercise that your child says, and just see what happens. I would recommend that you try this with your partner, with your friends. You will be amazed, but let me give you some specific examples. So your child says, I've picked some super random stuff here. So your child might say, I want to be a cat. So we repeat back, you want to be a cat. They may well say, Jack is so annoying. You repeat back, Jack is annoying. Your child says, I want blue eyes. You repeat back, I want blue eyes. You repeat back, you want blue eyes. Now, when we paraphrase back to our children, what they have said to us, we do two things. Well, we do multiple things, but two specific things. The first one is that we build connection because your child is thinking, because you've paraphrased back, my parent is listening to me. Now, obviously I've picked some really short statements here. Some children will have long statements. Some will have short statements, but in essence, when we paraphrase back that we build that connection, our child believes that my parent is really listening to me. And, and this is genuinely the sweet spot. We provide a prompt for more clarification, which is where the magic of connection really happens. So let's go back to the statements that we had before. So let's play through the, I want to be a cat. Yeah. So you want to be a cat. Child says, I want to be a cat because Rosie, that's your cat, maybe. Is loved by everyone. So we might repeat back, loved by everyone. And your child might say, yeah, yes. I don't feel anyone in the family loves me. Sweet spot. You've now got a real lens into your child's world, which is simply started from, you know, I want to be a cat. And we might be tempted to kind of go, don't be so ridiculous. You're a, you're a human and you're lovely and you're wonderful. And we love you. Yeah. We go down that route, which quite frankly, I have done more often than not. What happens then is we've missed that opportunity to really connect and understand what might be going on for our child. And if we think that through, particularly if this child is feeling like I'd love to be the cat because the cat, everyone loves the cat. And I don't feel anyone in this family loves me. How might that play out in your child's behavior day to day with their siblings if they feel unloved? So that's why it's such a powerful tool to be able to do that. So that's, that's the cat. All right. Let's go back to the statement. Jack is so annoying. We repeat back. Jack is annoying. Yeah. And so what we then hear is Jack is annoying because Jack is able to do everything. And every time I try something, I'm really rubbish at it. Yeah. He could do everything. We repeat back. He can do everything. I'm rubbish at everything. Rubbish at everything. I can't ride a bike. I can't read. I can't do math. Substitute it for anything. But can you see here that when we paraphrase back, mirror back to our child what they've, what they have said to us. And by doing so, we've created that pause instead of us going into that. You mustn't say that Jack is annoying. He's your brother and you should really love him. And you know, I loved my brother or I used to get, have arguments with my brother, whatever that might be. We get into that, stuck into that parent mode. And we lit, we miss that real sweet spot of why that sibling is actually finding their other sibling annoying. And again, that's powerful because that's showing us that, okay, every time this child interacts with their sibling, Jack, there's a whole force of frustration and possibly envy, possibly jealousy, possibly low confidence that they have a sibling who seems to be able to do everything and they feel a failure by comparison. And that's the issue that we want to connection, and good sibling relationships. That's the power of that. Let's just go back to the last one about I want blue eyes. So it may well be I want blue eyes. You want blue eyes. Jessica has blue eyes. Everyone loves Jessica. Everyone wants to play with her and no one wants to play with me. Again, we've now got a bit of a lens. Now, Jessica is not necessarily the sibling in this scenario, but it's someone in a play group. It's someone at nursery. It might be someone at school. It might be that Jessica's super popular. This might be our teen or 16-year-old making this comment. Can you see how powerful this can be at teasing out what our children are actually thinking, what they're feeling, and what they're working through? And of course, our instincts, well, certainly mine at least, would be to jump in, giving that blue eyes comment. But you're so beautiful. You're brown eyes. Why would you want another color or something similar to that, which shuts off the conversation, doesn't encourage our children to open up? And so often when I'm giving parent talks, whether it's at schools, whether that's in organizations, parents will ask me at any level and any age and stage that their child is at, how can I get my children to talk to me? I know it's super important as they get older that I have that connection. I want them to feel that I'm a safe space. For them to go to. And we try these much more orchestrated and contrived, let's sit down and talk about stuff. Whereas actually children tend to open up and talk in those, A, the most inopportune moments, but often in those moments where we're really demonstrating that we've parked all our distractions, that they have our attention, but from that real listening to everything that they say and trying to reflect. That back that then potentially encourages more. You may not get this initially. It may take time. I would just encourage you to practice. I think you will be pleasantly surprised at how powerful it is and how much your children open up as a result of that. So what I would encourage you to do, because with that particular scenario about the blue eyes, what it's done is it's allowed us to kind of open up that conversation about self-acceptance. And a feeling of not yet being as good as someone else. And that's really where we can pick up the conversation and do the work at bridging any skills gap. Makes sense? If you like this strategy, even if you're undecided, I would encourage you to practice this with your partner, your friends, and see how it changes your conversations and connections. Particularly if you're feeling like a bit, I don't quite know how I'm going to put this in place or implement this with my family. I think you'll find it will be really useful just to give it a practice, just to see how it goes. Try it with an adult. So that is number two, which is create special time once a week for each child. Number three, create own time space. So this is both time and also physical space for each child. So this is recognizing our children need opportunities to simply be in their own company. And that's a real big part of their own bucket emptying. Even if they resist it, even if they're, I don't know, getting stroppy or. Like, oh, I'm so bored. Why do I have to have time on my own? I'd much rather play with my sibling. I think it's a real great way. Of course, we want our children to connect with each other. We want to connect as a family. But what we also want our children to do is to connect with themselves, because that gives them a chance to empty their bucket in whichever form that needs to be for them. But what it also does is it helps them tune into their own narrative, their own voice, to then be able to use their own voice to be able to communicate back what they want to do, the things that they value, rather than what can tend to happen is that we find, particularly when we have dynamics of three children, is that two will play with each other quite a lot and build that connection because it's become a bit of a default. Whereas actually when we encourage our children to have their own time, we build opportunities for the child that doesn't typically connect in the same way to have that opportunity as well. So I would, it's about creating that own time and space. We don't have to be regimented with this. We just have to actively seek out opportunities for our children to spend time on their own as well, because that's a really big part of their bucket emptying, which means we're much less likely to get that friction. Right. Quite at the same extent, because the interactions that they have with their siblings already comes with an emptier bucket. So number three is about creating own time space. Number four is establishing a family pact, almost like a code of practice. Don't worry, this isn't an arduous document, like a corporate mission statement. It's more about communicating family values and boundaries together. Yeah, so some family values, for example, you know, might be your family value might be that we value kindness and respect. There'll be a whole host of others. But if we focus on kindness and respect, how these translate into day to day behaviors, maybe we in this family, we show kindness through sharing, through never laying hands on each other without permission. Right. These are the words that I typically use, the laying hands on each other, to cover any unwarranted physical contact, which covers pushing, hitting, shoving, biting, but it also covers tickling, hugging, and play fighting. When the other child has said no, or the other child doesn't like it, because what that does is it teaches and encourages an awareness of consent. So obviously, you know, it's obvious, she says, but you know, most families don't like it. You know, most family values have a, we don't hit each other, we don't push, we don't any of that. But I think sometimes we forget that for some siblings, and we know that as a parent, you know, if our children are really angry, some children want to be hugged, some children just do not want to be touched. So when we are encouraging our children, on this basis of we do not lay hands on another member of this family, without their permission, we cover everything. We don't just cover the hitting and the smacking. We cover that sibling that's constantly trying to hug the other one or tickles them or won't stop when it comes to play fighting. You're setting a really clear pact within your family, that kindness also looks like it's not just sharing. It's also this, it's the words that we use. And so we can also when we think about it from the consent perspective of not laying hands is that we can also model that. We don't have to go overboard. We can ask permission to, can I give you a hug? Would it be okay if I give you a hug? Can I tickle you? Just those small things, so that that spoken value becomes reinforced in the behavior that we model for our children. And we do it, we do it that way. Now, the value of respect, for example, if we choose that, you know, in this family, we value respect, this could be about accepting others might have a different opinion than us, and that's all right. Others may want to play different games. They may choose not to play. They may choose to play with us, or they may choose to stop playing midway through. And we, as a family, as a part of our pact, we value all choices. And it's about exercising that respect in the moment. And to reinforce our family pact, and to also demonstrate our commitment. So it's not just a words thing, it's not a words exercise that we do as a one-off. We do it and we reinforce it regularly. I do believe, and for those of you who've been listening regularly, I talk about it a lot, about having regular family meetings to review your family values, to praise when we've seen our children adhering to that family value, to resolve any new issues that might have come up during the week or the past few weeks, and refine our family pact in any way which is necessary. But it's about working together as a family, problem-solving together, so they can see it's this connectedness. We often say to our children about, you know, we're a family, we're a team, we're in this together, but we don't necessarily demonstrate that by having something as a regular habit and a regular practice, which pulls everybody in. And we tend to just then use the, we're a team, we're in this together, in scenarios where there's conflict. Rather than also recognising it when there's times of peace and harmony and tranquillity and kindness and compassion. So number four is about establishing a family pact. The fifth hack is about using schedules or rotas for high conflict activities. So if your children fight over what to watch on television, time on a trampoline, a much-loved toy, a device, whatever that is, if this consistently causes issues and arguments, then at one of your family meetings, you may choose to discuss creating a schedule or a rota for use of that toy, of that trampoline, of that television, of that device. Whatever that might be that has got a high intensity, maybe it's over mummy or daddy time. It may, you know, maybe that's your biggest conflict. But whatever it might be, and if that's happening consistently, do it collaboratively, do it as part of the family meeting. Notice that time on the television causes a lot of arguments and conflict because everybody wants to watch something different. How about we create some way of having a schedule so that everybody gets to choose what they want throughout the day at one point during the day. And then what we're trying to do in this situation is that the rota or the schedule doesn't have to necessarily be about exclusive use. So in the television example, it could simply be that between this time and that time, this child gets to choose what's on and the others can stay and enjoy or they can choose to do something else. What I would say with whether you do exclusive use or whether you don't do exclusive use will depend on the level of conflict it causes. So the severity, but also the type of conflict. So it may well be that you might have to do exclusive use for the television or use on a particular device because the other sibling may well then be intruding, interfering in such a way that they don't get the full enjoyment from it. But that's something that you can play around with. But rather than feeling that you're constantly having to navigate and negotiate. And resolve conflict around something, create a roster, create a schedule, but get everybody actively involved in it and then review it regularly. So this is about, again, bringing it back into that family pact and those family meetings. We've created this roster and this schedule. Hey, guys, how's it working? We've had it for a week. What's worked? What hasn't worked? How might we need to change it? So it becomes, again, it's a collaborative thing. And our children feel like they've got, they're empowered. They've got some sense of agency over what happens in the family, but also what happens around managing that conflict with the other siblings in that way, too, which is a really important thing. So before I give you my final hack, I just want to quickly remind you of the five hacks that we've talked about. Create opportunities for whole family time. Create special time once a week for each child. Create own space time for each child so that they can have their time on their own. Establish a family pact and follow that through with regular family meetings. And number five, when we've got specific things that create high conflict, use a schedule or a roster to manage that. And my final hack, and the reason why I've put it at the end is because it's relevant to all of them and I haven't included it in the five, is, you know, never underestimate. The power of praise. It is more powerful than any corrective strategy that you might need to put in place, particularly when we give praise in the moment, because our children get real time information. in the moment feedback, which is more powerful for them than anything. Remember to use descriptive praise. So you say what you see, even if they haven't yet mastered kindness or respect in the ways that you truly intend them as part of your family values, but they have had a really good go. And for them, they've made progress relative to where they are, however small that might be, then praise them. It is the most powerful tool that you have as parents in your toolkit and it will get you further in a shorter period of time than any corrective communication or any corrective conversation that you could have. So those are my five hacks and I would love to get some feedback from you. How are you finding it? Particularly love to know about the repeating back, the paraphrasing, which I will dive deeper into. in a bucket emptying episode. So look out for that. As ever, if you enjoy listening to the podcast, I would be eternally grateful if you could rate, follow and review this podcast so that others can find us and we can spread the love. So until next time.
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