- Support siblings to nurture each other. When one child gets hurt, make it a practice for everyone in the family to stop playing and tend to the child who’s hurt. Hold back a moment to see if the siblings step in to nurture each other. Send a child for the ice pack or band aids, or even let them be your medical assistant and tend to their sibling. Include all the children in this, including any child who was involved in the other getting hurt, so they can begin to feel like a helper instead of a hurter.
- Instead of pitting your children against each other, find ongoing ways to unite them in the same mission.“Can you work together so you’re both ready to leave the house at 8am? That will give us time to go the long way to school so we can see the bulldozers at the construction site again. Yes? What a team!”
- Promote the idea of the sibling team by creating family activities in which your children work together. For instance, give them a huge sheet of paper to draw on together. Ask them to write a letter to Grandma together. Design a scavenger hunt where the kids help each other, rather than compete against each other. When you roughhouse, always team children against grown-ups.
- Put your kids in charge of a project together. For instance, maybe they’ll wash the car together, to earn the money you would have spent at the car wash. Or maybe they’re in charge of the decorations for Father’s Day, or planning a fun family outing. Let the children work together to do the planning, with you only peripherally involved to insure safety and maximum fun.
- Family Kindness Journal. Tie sheets of paper together with a ribbon, or just add sheets of paper to a binder. Label it “Our Family Kindness Journal”and let the kids decorate it. You might begin with a quote about kindness, such as the Dalai Lama’s: “Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.” Then, notice acts of kindness between your children, and write them in the journal, with the date.
“Brody helped Katelyn with her fort when it kept falling down.”
“Carlos shared the cookie he brought home from school with Michael.”
“Natalya helped Yuri reach the light switch. Yuri was so pleased.”
“At the grocery store today, Evie suggested that we buy oranges for Damian.”
As you talk about the incident, celebrate that kindness has a way of warming the hearts of both people – the giver and the receiver. Soon, your children will be noticing the small kindnesses between them and asking you to record them. Before you know it, they’ll be inspired to more acts of kindness toward each other. - Help kids work out problems without making anyone wrong. Conflict is part of every human relationship, and children are still learning how to manage their strong emotions. So you can expect your children to fight with each other. Our job as parents is to resist taking sides, which increases sibling rivalry. Instead, teach kids healthy conflict resolution skills, like listening, expressing their own needs without attacking the other person, and looking for win-win solutions. (Want more ideas on how to teach kids these skills? That’s the heart of my book, Peaceful Parent, Happy Siblings: How To Stop the Fighting and Raise Friends For Life.)
And of course the most important factor in helping your children get along is for you to forge a strong relationship with each child. When each child knows in his bones that no matter what his sibling gets, there is more than enough for him, sibling love has a chance to bloom. There is ALWAYS more love.
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Dr. Laura Markham is the author of Peaceful Parent, Happy Siblings: How To Stop the Fighting and Raise Friends For Life and Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids: How To Stop Yelling and Start Connecting. Find her online at AhaParenting.com
