Conflict is common to all human relationships, especially siblings. What do you do when it’s occurring in your home? Consider trying some of the following tips with your children:
- Model honor and respect as you relate to one another in marriage.
- Avoid four traps: favoritism, denial, discouragement, and loss of focus – enemies parents need to fight.
- Train them to ask for forgiveness when they hurt one another.
- Train them to grant forgiveness.
- Listen to both sides before coming to a judgment.
- Let natural consequences occur.
- Give up trying to prove who is the guilty party.
- Don’t expect children to be conflict free.
- Give children alternatives – work it out or you’ll have a privilege of a chore.
- Have game plan ready in advance for a conflict zone (i.e. car, especially on a trip).
- Use the children’s conflicts to teach them to identify their emotions and to help them label what they feel.
- Never lose sight of the goal as a parent. You are training them for relationships, character, and who God is.
- Realize there’s a difference about how genders solve sibling rivalry; boys are physical and girls are more verbal.
- Recognize three types of sibling rivalry: verbal, physical, and relational.
- Use grade cards with babysitters to encourage accountability and good behavior.
- Be careful when your children, especially daughters, enter junior high years when cliques begin to occur.
- Tie the consequence to the conflict; for example, if they borrowed something without asking, ban them from borrowing something for the next 30 days.
- Don’t solve the problem for them; teach them to solve it themselves.
- Pray that you’ll catch them.
- Use Scripture to develop a penalty system.
- Dads, don’t let children wear your wife down and confuse her.
- Occasionally, ask them to write out their problems and what they are feeling to their brothers or sisters.
- Use sibling rivalry to teach them that God is still in control.
- Create situations where both parties can express what they are feeling.
- Ignore most of it.
