Do you want to know how to cope with sibling rivalry? Well you're not alone. Sibling rivalry
is a pretty common problem and in this video we're going to be addressing it.
I'm Nicholeen Peck and I teach relationships, communication
and self-government all over the world and in this video, I'm going to be sharing with
you some tips and strategies that you can use to stop sibling rivalry at your house.
In this video I'm gonna be sharing with you five tips that you can use to help your family reject
the idea that sibling rivalry is normal because it does not need to be. Even though it happens
in a lot of homes, how about you work toward not having it happen in your house and if it does
happen, let's talk about what you can do. Sibling rivalry is essentially two siblings competing
with each other about something. Maybe it's a thing, maybe it's a tension but it's a definite selfish
condition that the siblings have and this trickles out and affects the entire family. In fact the
whole home culture can actually be damaged because of this sibling rivalry. So what do we do about it?
One way to stop sibling rivalry from occurring at all is actually to prepare the children by
teaching them skills that they need for success. So I teach self-government. Self-government is being
able to determine the cause and effect of any given situation and possessing a knowledge of your
own behaviors so that you control them. So what that means is that each person learns to control
themselves by analyzing themselves, making plans for themselves and then fixing their progress
when they don't succeed as they move along. The children can learn to do this and it starts with
four basic skills. The four basic skills are following instructions, accepting "no" answers and
criticism, accepting consequences and disagreeing appropriately. In fact, I actually have four books
that teach the children the four basic skills so that they can learn them from somebody else
and see how useful they are in their lives. When a person knows these skills, they can handle problems
with each other. A lot of people think children should learn to disagree appropriately with adult
figures or with their parents but they forget that that skill is also useful with siblings. So if you
teach the child the skill accepting no answers so that they can accept no answer from their sibling
and you teach them the skill disagreeing appropriately so that they can handle a problem
in an appropriate, non-hostile kind of a way with their sibling too, then chances are they can handle
a lot of the problems themselves without fighting and if you do need to correct the problems, you can
point them back to the skill that they can use that they forgot to use in the first place. Tip
number two is to create a picture in everybody's mind in the family of what type of family you're
trying to create. I call this a family vision. So, a family vision is when the family picks a time
in the future, maybe it's a holiday or something the family always does and they say 20 years from
now we want our family to feel like this, look like this and they make a plan according to that vision.
Take your children aside and create that story with them. If you need some help doing that,
you can find a lot more help on my website teachingselfgovernment.com. Before I get to
my next three tips, do you have more questions about sibling rivalry because I have a lot of
videos about sibling rivalry on this channel and I'm coming out with more because this is a problem
that affects so many people. So if you have other questions about sibling rivalry, be sure to put
them in the comments below so that we can get you to the right video. Here's another proactive tip
for you. If you want your children to fight less, they need to have stronger bonds or connections
with each other, which means you need to do deliberate relationship development as a family.
So in our family, we do regular family activities. These are things that are a high priority for the
family. We pick one night a week to have it be a family night, maybe we're gonna play a favorite
family game, maybe we're gonna go to a park and enjoy some time together. We plan for this activity,
we make sure that the family puts the family relationships as a high priority. If your children
have time to play together and bond together, not with other friends, not with other families but
just as a family unit, then they actually will learn to communicate better with each other.
They'll value each other more which will help establish that vision even deeper in their hearts
so they'll see why they need to find other ways like those skills that we talked about that
they need to communicate with each other to solve their problems. If you have a problem with sibling
rivalry, one thing that you can do that makes a big difference is have a family meeting about
the problem. If you don't have family meetings already, you can learn about family meetings in the
teaching self-government course but I also have journals. These journals have the structure, the
meeting format in them that the family can fill out each week. So as a family in order to maintain
that family vision and to check up on how we're doing as a family, we have a special time where we
meet together for 20 minutes, only 20 minutes every single week. We usually do it on Sunday afternoons
but you can pick a time that works best for your family. As part of these family meetings, we discuss
problems that we're having as a group and we make plans for how to solve those problems. So if the
family has really gotten into sibling rivalry, then you need to discuss as a group how you're
going to handle the problem when it arises and we might be coming up with positive consequences,
negative consequences but we're going to have some good open discussion with the parameters that are
part of a really good effective family meeting and then we're gonna follow through after that.
So what happens if they do have a problem? There's some sibling rivalry that's occurring, what do you
do? There's two different scenarios that I could see happening. One scenario is they had a fight,
you're seeing one person misbehave toward another. Maybe the other person is not misbehaving yet.
In that case, you just do an effective correction for the one child that is misbehaving and not
treating the other one kindly, okay, and those steps to a really effective correction can be found in
all the teaching self-government materials that I have because that is a really common skill set
that parents need. But let's say that we have the second scenario which is very common which is
both children are behaving badly toward each other or not doing things the way they should. Maybe one
child is not accepting a no answer, the other child is not disagreeing appropriately so they've got
a power struggle, that's happening what do you do then to help them solve this problem and to stop
the sibling rivalry? Well you do something that I call a group problem solving. A group problem
solving is when you notice a situation where multiple people are in conflict and you say stop
talking everybody come over here, maybe if they're sitting you're gonna have them stand and come to
you in a different you know area. Maybe if they're standing, you're going to have them come sit down
on the couch and you're going to have a talk about it. You move them to a different area so they leave
the problem behind, that's really important because then they can look at their own problem third
person, then you say okay, so let's talk about what happened and usually the person who's the most
emotional or maybe the youngest person gets to go first and you say every person is going to get an
opportunity to tell everything that happened and then I will repeat back what happened so that you
know I understand but while one person is talking, no one else gets to say anything and then you will
get your turn next so each person will get a turn and then I will tell you how we're gonna handle it.
So you go around the group one by one, repeating back so that they make sure to know that you
understand what they said happened. At the end of it, you're going to find out someone didn't do
the accepting and no answer skill and another person didn't disagree appropriately
and another person then got involved maybe and started hitting them to solve the problem,
well they weren't accepting no answers either because they were crossing over a boundary line.
Maybe there's three people fighting and all three people didn't handle the situation correctly. We
do not go searching for who started it, that does no good. We only talk about what people did with
their specific behaviors and what they should have done instead in the situation. So then I might do a
little correction for each child and they get the opportunity to earn an extra chore, which is a good
negative consequence because work is the antidote for a sick character. So, they'll go off and they'll
do that extra chore and then we're also going to practice the situation again and we're going to
now do it the right way. Utilizing the skills that they already know that you've reminded them should
have been used in that situation. Another part of a group problem solving that can be utilized
is a problem-solving exercise called a SODAS. So SODAS is an acronym that stands for situations,
options, disadvantages, advantages, solutions. This is a great way to help develop the prefrontal cortex
of your children so that they can do better at problem solving but when they've had a group
problem, they can see how it could have played out differently by going through this exercise
of a SODAS exercise as a group. You can do it verbally or written and how you run through
those exercises is actually detailed in all of the teaching self-government program and course.
You are on the road to stopping sibling rivalry at your house and getting everybody united. There is
something vital that can really help you on this journey and that is understanding what
an expectation trap is for you as well as what the expectation trap is for your children which
could be leading to this sibling rivalry. So if you've enjoyed this video, I know you're gonna
love the next one which is called "The Expectation Trap versus The Cycle for Success" so that you can
see what that cycle looks like that's trapping everybody every time and what to do to make
it a cycle for success instead. This will be enlightening for you as well as your children.
So click the link to "The Expectation Trap versus The Cycle for Success" now. I'll see you there.