Want to avoid sibling wars with young kids in your family? Have a family meeting and listen to both sides.
Make sure kids don’t grow up with emotional or physical scars. Family meetings allow you to attend to sibling wounds right away, and be there to referee the sibling fights because they will come up all the time. They are especially helpful for blended families. There was never really a happy Brady Bunch. Stepchildren and half sibling need family meetings.
How to do this? Listen-Show a respect for each point of view; listen to both sides.
Schedule a kid sibling family meeting at the same time each week. Serve the food they love- even if it’s junk food.
Family meetings are an excellent tool to listen to both sides of a sibling argument. They provide a safe arena where you can impose rules about each person taking a turn to express his or her viewpoint. Parents can also set rules in the beginning about no interrupting so each child can say what he or she has to say without another child butting in. At the family meeting you can ask each sibling to share his or her concerns and use the Go Around technique where each person at the meeting gets to respond to the topic. So if the Go Around topic was what happened this week that you didn’t like, and one sibling said something the other sibling did made him mad, the Go Around technique would give the other siblings a chance to respond in a really safe environment. You are listening to both sides of the issue.
Check out my book Mom Love You Best Forgiving and Forging Sibling Relationships . There is an entire section with 20 tips to raise healthy siblings. You can also visit my You Tube channel Momlovesyoubest for those tips. .
My New Family Meeting book will be out this summer. Check out my website for the book.