Speaker 1Hello and welcome to the How Not to Screw Up Your Kids podcast. So, pour yourself a cuppa, find a comfy seat and enjoy the conversation. This is episode 17 and today I'm talking about how to manage sibling conflict. It's one of the most common daily parenting challenges I get asked about and with some tweaks here and there we can create so much more harmony. Now let me start by being totally honest and upfront. Sibling rivalry, disagreements and fallouts are normal. They really are. Think back to when you were younger with your siblings or cousins or friends if you were an only child. Our children are vying and competing for a limited resource. Our time and attention to our children is not enough. It's not enough. It's not enough. So it is unrealistic to expect happy families all of the time. Your children will want to kill each other at times and really dislike each other most of the rest of the time and that's normal. You aren't a bad parent, you haven't failed and they are certainly not going to turn into a psycho killer. However, there are things we do as parents which makes things worse, which we need to stop doing and there are some new things we do as parents which make things worse. So, let's get started. Here's a typical scenario. It starts off innocently enough. There's a small disagreement. Voices become raised. There's shouting, then screaming and one of your children races to find you in floods of tears, sobbing so much so that you can't actually make out what they're saying. You ask what happened. You get one story from the sobbing child as the other runs in, to defend their actions and gives you a different version of events. Who do you believe and what do you do about it? Sound familiar? Let's be honest. We've all been there. Me as much as everyone else. Nothing, nothing is more upsetting than watching your own children at each other's throats with no regard for each other's feelings or sensitivities. Whether your children engage in the physical or the verbal mudslinging or maybe even both, it can create such an atmosphere at home that it either makes school holidays uncomfortable at the least or downright unmanageable at its worst. This podcast episode, I want to focus on the three common mistakes we make as parents and what we ought to be doing instead. Trust me, I've learnt the hard way when my children went through a pretty dire stage of having the most monumental arguments. So, we're going to look at each one in turn and then we're going to talk through some strategies to help so that we can combat these. And if we need to do another episode, if we get some feedback and you need more, then let me know and we'll do more. So, let's start with the first one. This is the single most common error that we make. And I would say, if after listening to these three, you can only implement one change, this is the one that you should look at changing first. And the first one is about getting an argument. So, the first one is about getting an argument. And as I said, this is the single most common reason that we get in the way. You know, as we had in that scenario, one child will come rushing in, usually in tears, and will give us one side of the argument. We then ask the other child whether the accusation is true. And then we get into this refereeing where we go backwards and forwards, trying to piece together what actually happened. And then we get into this and who's to blame. And the mistake here is that we are relying on our children to be 100% honest. And let's face it, they won't be. Of course, they won't be. We're not entirely 100% honest. So, what happens is when we get involved in these situations where we end up asking for different sides of the story, and then we referee and then carve out, don out the punishment, there will always be a loser, a winner, and we will always be seen to have taken sides. My rules are simple. If you have not seen it, you cannot referee it. End of. And I know that that's a tricky one because we all know our children, and we all know which of our children is more likely to react physically to a verbal slur that their sibling might dish out. So, we can usually make a pretty accurate, educated guess as to what's happened. But we're really stepping back and thinking, on pretty rocky ground when we haven't seen it with our own eyes to objectively counter any arguments. So, my advice is do not referee it, but instead look at other strategies where you're instead intervening earlier on and separating the children before things escalate. So, let me talk you through this particular situation. We all know that our children, we can always tell the warning signs, can't we? They're maybe in their bedrooms playing, or if they're fortunate enough to have a playroom or an area where they can spread out, it starts amicably enough. And then we can begin to hear the voices raised. And so, my advice is, and I'll be honest with you, this is going to take a lot of your time. It's going to take a huge amount of your time. It's going to mean that you're not going to always be able to prep food, get on with other bits and pieces of your life. It's going to mean that you're not going to always be able to prep food, get on and play. But what I will say is the investment you make in time now, being actively involved and avoiding the escalation, whilst it will be more time consuming and more disruptive of what you might be doing instead, it will ultimately save you more time. Because let's face it, how often do you end up spending so much of your day refereeing, getting involved, asking children to share, play nicely, be nice, apologise, and all of the kind of bad feelings and atmosphere that creates in the house. So, yes, it's going to take a huge amount of time, but it will pay dividends so much so that you will wonder how you ever got through without it. So, what we do is, when we can hear those voices beginning to escalate, we want to calmly and matter-of-factly say, for example, I can hear voices are getting raised and to avoid any possible upsets, I think it's best you have some time and some space separately. Sophie, can you please go there? And George, can you go there? In 30 minutes, we can try again. So, that's just a broad paraphrase that you can use. But in essence, what you're doing is you're hearing the voices escalating rather than going in and saying, I can't believe that you two can't just play nicely. Why do I have to keep, you know, I was in the middle of doing something. Why do I have to keep coming in and sorting you two out? We just calmly and matter-of-factly go in to say, look, I can hear voices are being raised. It doesn't sound like we're necessarily managing to find some compromises or middle ground or sharing this particular toy, television programme, whatever. Why don't we just go off and do something separately for a little while and maybe in a little while, we'll get back together and try again. So, what you're trying to do with this is you're trying to avoid the situation and start giving them those tools and strategies. And we do it calmly, matter-of-factly, and then we separate them and then we bring them back together so that they're then able to go back to their game having had some time apart. So, that would be my first. Now, whilst intervening early will take up a lot of your time initially, it will definitely yield long-term rewards over and above anything else that I have particularly tried. So, first rule is getting involved in arguments and disagreements we've not witnessed ourselves are where the problems come in. So, if you come away from this podcast with only one new strategy you're going to try, it's about being very diligent that if you have not witnessed a disagreement, do not get into that refereeing and hearing different versions of events. Instead, use a strategy where when you can hear voices escalating, intervening early and then separating them, or the alternative aspect of that, which I also use is, I can hear voices being raised, doesn't sound like you're necessarily having a great time or managing to compromise, but I have every faith that you can sort this out between you. So, again, you're encouraging them to problem solve. So, you can use either strategy. We can normally tell where their voices are escalating, whether actually it's best to separate them because we think we're at that tipping edge where it's just gone too far, or whether we can intervene and we're able to get in when the voices are just beginning to escalate. But by us walking in, we've taken a little bit of the heat out of the situation. We've given them that positive affirming that we have every belief that they can sort it out between them. And then we come out. Do not be tempted to get sucked in, as one child says, oh, but Sophie's not sharing or George is being unkind and he keeps bashing me over the head with this whatever that might be don't get sucked in repeat the phrase I have every faith that you two can resolve this otherwise you can then have some bit a bit of time and space and go off and do separate things have that faith in more level and calm your voices the more matter of fact you speak whilst also being compassionate the more likely your children are to resolve it because your children resolve conflict day to day at school with their friends they manage these situations so it's about helping them manage these situations individually that they know how to do this they can do it they just need us to be removed from the situation now what I whilst I have said that you cannot referee situations that you have not seen you 100 percent can get involved in a situation that you have not seen you 100 percent can get involved in a situation that you have not seen you 100 percent can get involved in a situation that you have not seen when you have seen a sibling conflict or argument and it's happened in front of you and you've witnessed it now that's a different one I would go back to the podcast episode where I've talked about how discipline doesn't work how punishments don't work because this is much more to do with consequences you have done x and that wasn't very kind thing to do therefore the consequence is y so it's a very different situation what we're trying to do with managing sibling conflict is when we get involved in situations where we haven't seen it's very different when you've witnessed an argument and you've seen how one particular child has reacted and made a poor choice then we can deal with it in terms of behavior and consequences so that's rule number one rule number two one of the most common mistakes that we make as parents is telling our children they should love each other as they are siblings I can't not remember personally the number of times my own mother told me as a child how I should love my sister and how lucky I was to have her as another adult I can appreciate that but as an eight-year-old who just wanted to play post office on her own without her six-year-old messing things up it didn't feel that way she just felt annoying children don't get to choose their siblings and they are entitled to get annoyed frustrated irritated jealous and downright peeved off if they want to their emotions are legitimate and they are theirs what we want to do as parents particularly around these sibling relationships is to help them make more appropriate responses appropriate choices about what they do with their behavior in response to those emotions so instead what we should be doing rather than saying our children are the ones who are the ones who are the ones who are the ones who are the ones who are the that what we should instead acknowledge how our child feels and then ask them how they might be able to make a better choice next time now there's a really big warning to this one and I'm going to expand on this a little bit more but a warning in terms of in terms of the second part of that so we should always acknowledge our children's feelings but when it comes to encouraging our children how they might make a better choice next time we should only do that when we're going to make a better choice next time we should only do this after the event when things are totally calm you know something along the lines of you know I can see that you feel really annoyed with your brother Ben all you want to do is build your lego in peace and he keeps coming over and interfering and moving the pieces you wish he would just go away and play elsewhere however pushing him and calling him rude names is not how we tell each other we're frustrated next time that happens what could you do instead and that's the way that we approach it but what we have to remember in the heat of any emotion in the heat of any moment our children don't think with their logical brain they deal with their emotional brain that primitive limbic brain that's at the back of their head rather than the rational objective problem-solving critical thinking part of their brain which is at the front so in the heat of the moment when it comes to managing those big emotions we just need to acknowledge we just need to meet our child where they're at I can see that it's really frustrating I can see that you're really upset and I understand and I'm here and when we're feeling a little bit more settled we can have a little chat we can have a chat about it so acknowledge the emotion meet your child where they are at in that moment and then revisit it when things are calm and it's really important that we revisit this because this is where our children learn this is where their children our children learn that whilst they in those heats of those moments they may not necessarily feel that they have total control of the situation and that the emotions takes control of them but we want to help our reflect back and understand that okay in that moment my emotions felt really overwhelming and I didn't know what to do but now I've taken a step back from the situation I've had feeling more calm and I'm able to look at it again more objectively I'm able to see what my other choices might have been because actually that becomes so much more helpful for our children and in terms of lifelong skills is that you're giving them the ability to problem solve to see that they are empowered enough to make different choices and that their emotions don't rule them but they need to find ways of making better choices in those in those moments and what we're also doing is we're helping build our children's emotional vocabulary we're building up their emotional intelligence we're building up empathy their understanding and whilst this podcast episode was specifically talking about how to manage sibling conflict and sibling relationships this ripples out into all aspects of the difficulties and challenges and interpersonal skills and social skills that our children need to flourish and to thrive not only at school but as they become adults and in the world of work now when we do try and problem solve when we do try and encourage our children about what you know what might you do differently next time if your child does look blankly at you and particularly this can happen if you're a little bit of a fixer addict like I have been when my children were younger and I was always wanting to tell them what to do I'm a reformed fixer by the way but if our children have been used to us telling them what the solution is and they we've not necessarily actively encouraged them to problem solve and so they look at you blankly when you ask them what might you do differently then we can when we're sort of first starting out using these particular techniques is offer them a couple of possible solutions so you know I found that sometimes this works or this one works and ask them to choose so you're giving them a couple of options two options three options I found that this has worked which one would you like to try first and then this is remember this is a sort of a cyclical process so when your child inevitably gets into another big emotion with their siblings or something else and we find that calm and that space and we reflect and we talk to them about it then bring back the scenario without being critical but just say you know last time we talked about this you're going to make this different choice instead maybe why did that not happen why do you and if they have chosen it why did that not work what could we do differently what might we do differently next time now that we've seen that so that there's some continuity in this you know much in the same way as our children are having the building blocks in terms of their intellectual development at school we want to give them the building blocks in terms of their emotional development and their emotional intelligence by constantly revisiting these particular situations so the we're looking at three common mistakes we make as parents and the strategies we can employ instead so the first common mistake we make is when we get involved in arguments and disagreements that we've not witnessed and we've talked about that the second common mistake that we make is by telling our children that they should love each other as their siblings and the third one and final one i'm going to cover in this podcast episode is the third common mistake we make is talking in terms of treating everyone equally rather than in accordance to their needs now this is such a common trap that we all fall into so we tend to treat our children equally because that seems to be the most equitable apportionment of our time we've only got a certain amount and yet the reality is so much more difficult children measure time very differently to us so the time you spend bathing a young child helping them with their homework practicing their spellings or even telling them off is all counted when you have an older child who needs less help or for instance who is more compliant then they can often feel marginalized that they don't get the same amount of time with you so instead rather than talking about spending time equally with our children what we should be doing instead is talking much more about treating our children and spending time with our children based on need the five-year-old who you have who's just started school needs more time when they get back from school as they can't do their homework as independently as maybe your 10-year-old can your 13-year-old will need more time potentially to decompress the challenges of friendships and maybe social media then maybe you're nine year old and so on so absolutely set aside time each day to spend with each child just being with them but don't get sucked into the trap and communicate to your children that you treat them all equally as you just simply can't it's not a reality it's not possible they all need you in different quantities and at different ages and stages in their life and this will ebb and flow and they will all get their turn so we need to change the narrative and the way that we communicate and express how we spend our time with our children so you will get these situations where you will have maybe you've got a child who's going through a particularly difficult time at school or maybe you've got an anxious child that gets a lot of your time and attention because they need to talk through things um ENJOY YOUR TIME WITH YOUR CHILDREN acknowledge how that might make their siblings feel acknowledge that it may feel like you're spending a huge amount of time with a particular sibling because of their the needs that they have and explain to their siblings that that's what they need at that time and remind them maybe of periods of time where they've had challenges and you've spent a lot of time with them or periods of time where they've needed more of your support because they've been less independent or less able to do things specifically than they should have and so on and so forth so they've been less able to do things specifically than they should have and so on and so forth so let's not get sucked into that definitely we need to be creating some time and space for each of our children each and every day even if it's just five minutes of a just a quick catch-up but it's being aware that when we communicate to our children when we talk about the time that we spend that we talk about need rather than equity because we all our children all need us at different times and that's exactly the same when we start looking at different bedtimes so i know this isn't necessarily about managing sibling conflict but i think it's an important piece to put in here because it does it is about need rather than equality it's being aware and looking at the ages and stages of your children and their development and recognizing that there may well be merit in your oldest going to bed later or if you've got three or four children staggering bedtimes that's a great way of giving each child what they need in terms of specific amounts of time to decompress with you but it's also good in terms of being able to communicate with the younger children who may feel it's not fair they're going to bed so much later than i am is that they need different things and with age comes privilege but with that privilege comes a responsibility and so they're able to go to bed later and when the younger children reach that same age they'll be able to go to bed later too but the eldest will always be the eldest and as such the eldest will always be able to do more in terms of privileges than the youngest because that's part of an age and a stage and a need rather than treating them all the same and that can the bedtimes can create all sorts of challenges and that's a separate podcast episode in itself but it can create lots of challenges but i think sometimes because of ease potentially we take our children up and we sort out bedtimes at the same time which in itself can create a whole host of challenges whereas actually taking the time to step back and look at the age and stage that our children are at might tell us which children need to be staying up that little bit later how can we stagger bedtime how can we find ways of responding to each child's needs and helping our children understand that there are always going to be these differences that we cannot treat everybody equally and everyone goes to bed at the same time because actually there is a difference in terms of age and stage so i hope that you have found that useful let me just quickly recap so that you can take this away with you so there are three common mistakes we make as parents we've talked about each one and specific strategies you can do in place the first and the most important one that i would suggest you start with first is do not get involved in arguments and disagreements you have not witnessed for yourself it creates tension because you end up refereeing something that you have not seen you are relying on your children to be 100 honest and they're not going to be because as human beings we don't recall events accurately as they are we recall events with our personal slant on it so do not get sucked into that instead try and adopt strategies that stop sibling arguments from escalating and becoming explosive common mistake number two is telling children that they should love each other because they're siblings which is absolutely they do not get to choose their siblings they are perfectly entitled to feel every frustration irritation annoyance upset jealousy they want we need to acknowledge that and we need to help them make better choices in those moments and the third mistake we make is talking in terms of treating everyone equally rather than in accordance to their needs so instead let's communicate to our children that it isn't about everybody getting exactly the same amount of time or going to bed at the same amount of time same bedtime or getting the same amount of time on devices it's all in accordance to their need their age and their stage so my give this week is a checklist so you can avoid these common pitfalls so head over to my free resource library drmaryhand.com forward slash library where you'll find the link to download the checklist or all you need to do is pop in your email address and get instant access not only to this week's resource but all the other free resources across all my podcast episodes as ever i'm going to make a plea for you to follow and review this podcast but i'm going to add a little bit more information so for everyone who downloads this podcast we appear in certain places in terms of charts and people can find us and the sort of the adverse weird sort of part of it is is that the more the podcast gets reviewed the more likely we are to show up in people's options and recommendations so that the more likely it is that people can actually benefit from these tools and strategies i've had so many wonderful wonderful emails telling me how much you've really enjoyed the podcast how helpful you have found it in your day-to-day but i need you if you have really loved this to follow and review the podcast because this is the only way that other parents are going to find this particular podcast and find the tools and strategies that they need otherwise they're struggling in the same ways you may have struggled before finding me so please do follow and review this podcast so that others can find us and we can spread the love so until next time you
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