Speaker 1At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet. Like offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone. And including dental, vision, and hearing coverage in every plan. And the best part is, every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium. Which makes it easier to save, too. So this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at GetHumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage HMO and PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal. Hello and welcome to the How Not to Screw Up
Speaker 2Your Kids podcast. So, pour yourself a cuppa, find a comfy seat, and enjoy the conversation. I'm coming to you in this episode with a bit of a story. I have a stinky cold, so excuse my slightly blocked up communication. I also have a dog sleeping at my legs and a kitten sleeping on my lap. What could possibly go wrong? Can you believe it? I've been recording and sharing this podcast with you now for two years. I just want to take a moment to thank each and every one of you who listens, follows, likes, reviews, and shares this podcast. I am so, so grateful. Eternally grateful. I get so many lovely messages. And because of you, this podcast is downloaded in over 60 countries, which is wild. I still find it crazy. So I'm very, very grateful. So thank you, thank you, thank you. Now, I've been thinking, how can I show my appreciation and thank you properly? And hopefully, I've come up with a way which you will appreciate. If you don't already know, I have an online How Not to Screw Up Your Kids podcast. You have access to all my digital courses covering topics from anxiety to big emotions and everything in between. They also get access to my monthly 60 Minutes with Dr. Mary Han online workshops, which are £8 to non-members, and a community app where I host weekly catch-up sessions and answer questions. Subscription has been £37 a month, and I have decided to reduce this to £9.79. Not just for the How Not to Screw Up Your Kids birthday, but for always, including for those who are already part of the community. So this means if you regularly attend my monthly 60 Minutes with Dr. Mary Han, where the tickets are £8, for just £1.99 a month more, you'll get access to all my courses. You get to pick my brains every week. You get access to all the resources in the hub. You get to hang out with a wonderful bunch. You get to talk to parents, just like you. Sound interesting? To sign up or to find out more, simply head over to my website and click on the How Not To Community link at the top. We'll also share the link in this week's resource and the show notes. Back to this week's episode. Which is episode 107. Probably one of the most common daily parenting challenges I get asked about. And with some tweaks here and there, we really can create so much more harmony. Now, if you're listening. To this and you have a single child, they don't have any siblings. Please do still listen, because a lot of the stuff that I'm going to talk about, the strategies that I'm going to talk about are also helpful when we're looking at dynamics between friendships or cousins or those sorts of things. So don't just think that this is only helpful if you're parenting more than one child. It's just as helpful if you're parenting just one child, I'm going to start off by being totally honest and upfront and saying that sibling arguments. Disagreements and fallouts are absolutely normal in the same way as it's typical for friends to have arguments and to fall out. They're really genuinely normal. Just think back to your own relationships with your siblings, your cousins, your friends when you were younger. You know, we are siblings are by nature vying for a limited source, which is your attention. So it's unrealistic to expect that we're going to have happy siblings. All of the time, you know, often think back those who know me very well and have known me for a very long time or therefore obviously know my sister. I'm one of three, my brother and the middle child. My brother is the eldest and my sister is younger. There's a much bigger age gap between my brother and I, there's seven years, but my sister and I is about like two and a bit years. And those who've known us very well will know that my sister and I used to argue a lot. I'm genuinely talking about a huge amount. They would see us arguing on the way to school because we used to walk to school together. In primary school, probably from when I was in the equivalent, I guess, of year five. So I would have been in year five and my sister would have been in year three and we caught the bus or we walked. And then when we both went to the same secondary school. So people who know us very well would have seen us arguing constantly. My mother would pull her hair out constantly and say, goodness me, why do you have to argue all of the time? I've never known anything like it. This is not normal. And we have the most incredible relationship now. So I don't want you to be thinking that you're doing something wrong. But there are some common aspects, I think, in terms of what we do as parents that do amplify, make those sort of sibling scenarios more problematic. But before we go in, I'm going to what I'm going to do is I'm really focusing in on three common mistakes that we make as parents and what we can do to rectify it. Before I go into that, I want to just give a bit of context. And a bit of background and foundations that we need to kind of consider for a moment. And it's this notion that fundamentally, as human beings, we have a tendency to compare ourselves. And when you have siblings or you've got close relatives or neighbors or friendships where you spend a lot of time together, then that comparison is amplified much more. And so as individuals, we have strengths and we have areas of development. So the people we spend a huge. Amount of time with, whether that's siblings or friends that we spend a lot of time with, that kind of holds up to the mirror sometimes to areas of ourselves that we need to be working on. And so when we're looking at what tends to happen as parents is we're caught up in the day to day moments of those sibling arguments and navigate and sort of refereeing them and dealing with them. The reason why it's so important for us to have some form of reflective practice as parents and why I really advocate these sort of family meetings is that it forces us to. Take a step back to kind of look at what's going on in the family from a sort of a higher level perspective rather than the micromanagement of day to day is because we're then much more able to pick up on aspects of sibling conflict that comes around from this notion that maybe we've got a child that's feeling particularly lacking in confidence or maybe they're struggling with their friendships, but they can see a sibling, another friend that is doing really well. Maybe they're struggling academically and they're not that they're actually struggling academically. But they're struggling with their perception of how well they're doing academically. And so that kind of tarnishes has a knock on effect in terms of their confidence. Maybe something's going on with the dynamics of their friendships at school and that's having a knock on effect. So it's really important that we of course, we have to deal with the day to day and those sort of situations, you know, and those are the micro, you know, we're really looking at it from that level. But we have to also have to pan the lens out and look at broadly and that overview of what else. What else is going on in my child's life that might also be impacting them? Are there some changes that they're going through in terms of their own personal development, in terms of their academic achievement, in terms of their perception of themselves, in terms of their friendship, in terms of their sleep, going back to the whole bucket that I talk about all of the time? What are those sorts of things that are going on that means when they're interacting with their sibling or interacting with their close friends, that this is spilling over? The force that's behind a lot of their behaviour is coming from that. So I think it's really important that we always deal with the situations in the moment, which I'll talk to you about, but also take a bit of a wider lens as well. I just think that that's really important. We just need to think of that and also to reset our expectations. I hear this so much and my mother was guilty of this and I've been guilty of this as well. We have this notion that our children, because they're siblings or cousins. Or their family should automatically love each other, you know, that they should always get along, that they should have an appreciation for that sibling. We have to shift our perspective on that just because we are born into the same family does not necessarily mean that we are going to like the people that are in our family. And that's not an indictment on family. And that's not saying that I'm suggesting that we just tell them that you don't have to like anyone in your family. But I think when we force this huge amount of pressure because they are your siblings. You should love them, you should get on with them, you should be kind to them, you should be all of whatever it is that we tell them that they should be. Because actually we just have to accept that we're by nature different temperaments. And sometimes we don't always get on with that temperament at a particular time. And that's OK. But at the bottom line, what we're teaching as part of the foundations and the values of this rising building that's happening with our children is that we have a foundational respect for other people. mind we're thoughtful to other people and whether those other people happen to be our siblings or they're our friends or they're teachers or they're carers or they're grandparents or they're strangers that we don't even know you know it's about the values that we have in terms of how we treat other human beings and take out this idea that because they're a sibling that we have to treat them any other way so I think that that's a kind of really crucial thing that we need we need to remember so let's start with a typical sibling fraction situation and I want to I'm going to use in this scenario not because I think it's really important to sort of set the scene about what typically happens so here's a typical scenario it starts off innocently enough there's a small disagreement voices become raised they're shouting then screaming and one of your children races to find you in floods of tears sobbing so much that you can't make out what they're actually saying you ask what happened and you get one story from the sobbing child and the other runs in whether it's another child or the friend to defend their actions and gives you a different version of events who do you believe and what do you do about it does that sound familiar let's be honest we've all been there me as much as everyone else nothing is more upsetting than watching your own child at each other's throats you know it breaks your heart doesn't it when you see a child these gorgeous little babies that you've had are practically wanting to kill each other either physically or in the words that they use and they seem to show absolutely no regard for each other's feelings or their sensitivities now whether your children engage in the physical or the verbal mudslinging or 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 well school holidays or even weekends so i'm going to focus on what i believe are the three common mistakes that we make as parents and what we ought to be doing instead say this genuinely from a perspective of you know i've kind of condensed down what i personally have learned the hard way where my children were pretty much went through an absolutely dire stage where they just had the most monumental arguments and it's not there's not always been the case you know i have i have been very fortunate in my my two have got on really well but it's not always been that way they have had a really horrid period where you know i think they'll probably both be honest that there was a lot of kind of loathing and they're very different characters the sort of sibling dynamics play out with everybody so let's start with the first common mistake that i think we make and it's it's when we get involved in arguments and the disagreements that we've not witnessed our self because that's a really important thing that i'm saying here now this is the single most common reason we get in the way because a lot of the things around sibling dynamics we amplify by getting in the way everyone talks about
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Speaker 2this it's the scenario that i've given about you know one child rushes in usually in tears and they give one side of their of the argument and then we ask the other child and we often do it with an accusatory sort of what have you done and then we end up refereeing backwards and forwards trying to piece together what happened and who's to blame the mistake that we make in this particular scenario because we've not witnessed it we've heard it and let's face it quite often we know our children very well we often know who's the instigator you know when i think back to the scenario with my sister and i i was great with words and reasonably good at holding my temper you know don't get me wrong i had a temper but i could pretty much hold it whereas my sister and i were pretty good at holding my temper and i was pretty was much more volatile no right or wrong it was just the way that we were so when we argued i knew as your children know and no doubt you knew with your siblings we end up we know which buttons to press we know what's going to trigger and if you've got a child who's particularly good with their words and you've got a child who just can't hold that temper in quite as well whether they get physical or whether they get verbal with it so we know the scenarios and so quite often what will happen is that they're not going to hold their temper and they're not going to hold their temper you'll get the child who's often quite physical or tends to do the mud slinging is the one that gets tipped over the edge so we know little mary hand has been niggling sister and has caused the argument but it's the other sibling who then creates the scenario by pushing or saying anything unkind just knowing that that happens means when we get into the refereeing we get caught in the refereeing we make these poor judgments in that we're trying to make a call on something that we've not seen based on the evidence that our children give us and let's be honest there will always be a winner and there will always be a loser as far as your children and we have taken sides and when we have not seen it it can be really difficult for that amplification of those you know you've taken sides not to have an impact on our children when we've witnessed an argument we can be much more objective about i saw you do x and the impact of x on your sibling was y and this is what happened it's really objective we can take the emotion out and whilst our children will be upset that there's been some consequences and that they've been sort of you know we've had to have a conversation with them about the way that they've behaved they can't argue with what we've physically seen what we've actually seen and what we're dealing with when we get caught up in refereeing disagreements where we've not observed them is that we've not been able to observe the subtle nuances we're not able to address and talk about the very specific things that we have seen and so from our child's perspective we're then ending up taking sides and we all know because we've all been there you know this whole you love x child more than you love me which is simply isn't the case we might have specific preferences we might find one child easier because their temperament is very similar to us but we love our children dearly but when we're refereeing and when we're trying to dole out consequences based on evidence that our children are giving us and let's face it we know as human beings if we get a sibling argument if you and i were at a party and we had a conversation with someone and we were then asked to recall that conversation our version of that conversation will share some common things but our interpretation will therefore be different we don't remember things as they truly are as human beings we put in our slant from our perceptions and our experiences and our reality and how we interpret facial expressions and tone of voice and what's communicated so we're never going to be able to objectively do that so my view is when you're in those particular situations where your children come up to you and there's been an argument where you've not been able to witness it you simply can't intervene so if you haven't seen it you've you can't referee it end of that's it instead we have to damage limit fallout of those sort of situations we can say i can see that you're both clearly upset sadly i wasn't there to see what had happened and then you you're just trying to say now let's see if we can help you feel a little bit happier um and less upset um and then let's move on because you can't referee it now what my advice in terms of how do we you know it's much more about how can we intervene to avoid these from escalating so my advice is basically is that you intervene and you separate children earlier when you can begin to hear the voices are raised and you know the inevitable is likely to happen you know you do the separation quietly and calmly and matter-of-factly you know i can hear voices are getting raised it sounds like we're not having a happy time or we're not playing nicely or we're finding it really difficult um and i think it's probably best for now that we just have a little bit of space and then we can do it again and then we can do it again and then we can do it again and then we can come back together so sophie can you please kind of do this um for a moment and george can you please do that and maybe in a few in a little while we can come back together and try again now i know we can't be watching our children all of the time and how can we ever expect to get anything else done if we're constantly having to listen however my honest counter argument to that is the amount of time that you spend refereeing so if you are a parent that's listening to this you're refereeing a huge amount my argument would be the amount of time that you spend refereeing and sorting out arguments that actually if you just spent a bit of time yes there's a lot of watch watching well not even watching but listening and then intervening and then getting involved and separating i would argue that what you'll find is if you'll reap the benefits it will yield long-term rewards over and above anything else i hope you've heard about it so the first one is do not get involved in arguments and disagreements that you've not witnessed instead adopt a very straightforward i didn't see it and then mop up the aftermath without making any judgment without asking for any clarification on what's happened and then give them some space but instead try and adopt a perspective of listening for voices beginning to get raised and then intervene to just say it doesn't sound like we're getting along it seems to be a bit of a disagreement and it doesn't sound like we're really managing to sort this out at the moment so why don't we just give ourselves a little bit of a break and then we'll come back together why don't you go there and do this and why don't you go there and do that so that's number one the second mistake that we commonly make is telling our children that they love each other as their siblings now i've talked about this before i cannot remember 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 now of course as an adult i can appreciate that but as an eight-year-old who just wanted to play post office on her own without her sister's permission i can't remember how many times i told her that i should love my sister and how lucky i was to have her now of course as an adult i can appreciate that but as an six-year-old messing things up you didn't feel that way you know this idea you know i just sort of felt my sister was quite annoying at the time so children don't get to choose their siblings and they are entitled you know we talk about this idea about emotions they're entitled to get annoyed frustrated irritated jealous and downright peed off if they want to their emotions are legitimate and and you know they are and what we want to do as parents is to help them to make more appropriate choices about what they do with their behavior in response to that so if you have got a child who's getting annoyed with their sibling who keeps knocking things over who doesn't understand the game properly then we need to acknowledge that so we need to acknowledge how our child is feeling and then ask how they might be able to make a better choice next time it's you know i think that that's really important now of course we don't do that in the heat of the moment we do that afterwards when things are calm but sometimes we don't do that in the heat of the moment we do something along the lines of look i can see that you're 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 somewhere else however pushing him and calling him rude names is not how we tell others that we're frustrated next time that happens what could you do instead and if your child kind of looks blankly at you then you can offer a couple of possible solutions and then ask them to choose we're just simply let's lose that narrative let's lose that constant you should love your sibling and you're so lucky that you've got that and i was an only child and i didn't have and oh what i wouldn't have given to have had a younger brother or an older sister or whatever it is let's remove that and simply say it's absolutely fine for you to be frustrated and irritated that's just not the most appropriate way that you do that how might we best do that sort of things that we do that can create some of these issues the first one is getting involved in arguments that we and disagreements that we referee that we haven't seen the second is telling our children that they should love each other and the third one is talking in terms of treating everyone equally rather than accordance of their needs now this is such a common trap that we fall into we want to treat our children equally because that seems to be the most equitable apportionment of our time and yet the reality is so much more difficult so much more difficult children measure time 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 who is more compliant then they can often feel that they're marginalized and that they're not getting the same amount of you of time with you because you seem to be spending more time telling that other child off or correcting a child or having to supervise a much younger child so instead i want you to shift your conversations and the narrative away from you know i'm trying to love you equally spending time with you equally to instead talking about treating your children differently based on need time is a portion based on need the five-year-old who's just started school needs more time from you when they get back from school because they can't do their homework independently you know which is different to your seven-year-old who's had you there sitting with them helping them with their homework but can now do things independently your 13-year-old is likely to need more time to decompress challenges that they've had about friendships or something they've seen on social media or comparison or those sort of typical challenges that maybe your nine-year-old who's not caught up in that aspect of comparison quite yet now absolutely set time aside each day to spend with each child that's really important but don't get sucked into the trap of communicating to your children that you treating them equally and spending equal amounts of time with them when you simply can't be more be honest and upfront talk about that you know you're apportioning based on need when your seven-year-old gets frustrated that you're spending time with your five-year-old going through homework explain to them that when you were at that stage that's what we did when your five-year-old is frustrated because you're having to bathe the two-year-old and spend lots of time supervising them and picking them up and feeding them explain to them that it's all based on need they need you more because they're less able to be independent because and that you were that was equally the same for them but the time that you get to spend with them snuggling reading stories is where you get the catch-up time because you can't this trap that we get into about loving our children equally and spending equal amounts of time with them but really focusing in on it's about need and it ebbs and flows so i hope you find those three helpful sort of ways so that you can pick up when if you've got sibling dynamics happening or you know arguments between two friends that are happening all of the time you can look at those three and say well which are the ones which one am i sort of feeling that i'm probably most guilty of and tackle that one first if you simply tackled one of those three you'll notice a significant improvement almost immediately so my give this week is going to be a checklist of those three so you can avoid those these common pitfalls so you head over to my free resource library drmaryhand.com forward slash library where you'll find the link to download the checklist all you need to do is pop in your email address and you'll get access not only to this week's resource but all the other free resources across all my podcast episodes as ever if you've enjoyed this episode i would love it if you could continue to follow review and make this podcast so that others can find us and we can spread the love so until next
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