Do you want to know how to deal with sibling rivalry? Well, you're not alone. I answer
that question all the time. I'm Nicholeen Peck, I'm a parenting expert and today, we're
talking about sibling rivalry. In this video, I'm going to share with you to principles
for dealing with sibling rivalry and you're going to get few bonus skills thrown in there
too. In my family, my children are best friends. Literally best friends. When my daughter London
who was 18 just left college, she started crying because she felt like she was leaving
Porter all alone with her parents. She's like, "Oh, we've all had our siblings around us
all the time, mom. And Porter's going to not have us there for a couple of years. I feel
so bad for him. We're such good friends. I'm going to call him all the time." She wrote
him letters, she wrote us letters too which is super sweet. Anyway, she wasn't necessarily
grieving for leaving our home. She just knew that their relationship would never quite
be the same. Forgive me for getting just a little bit choked up. But they are truly,
really good friends. So does that mean that they never argued? Practically, they practically
never argued. And I have family of strong-willed people. They do argue some, a little bit.
Let me tell you how I handle that with them and how I've helped people handle it for many
years now all over the world.. The first principle to keep in mind is to have family unity and
friendship in that family. So, how do you foster family unity and friendship? There
are multiple things that we do. Number 1, we have a vision of who we're becoming as
the Peck family. We also have a family mission statement that we say every day. We have our
family devotion time. And after we pray, part of that devotion is to say our family mission
statement. That family mission statement reminds us who we are and what type of an environment
we need to have at our house. What type of a support that we are for each other. Our
family mission statement starts like this: "We the Peck family will love, support and
be united with one another." It goes on from there. But you get the idea. So, we have a
family vision, a family mission statement, we also have regular family activities. At
least once a week, we schedule a time as a family to do something fun together. We learn,
we discuss, we play, we do things that are meaningful together as a group. And we put
it as a high priority. This fosters our unity and our friendship. We also have meetings,
family meetings. Every week in Sunday afternoons, our family gathers together and we discuss
our family. We discuss our goals as a family. We discuss our relationships and we solve
problems together in calm productive ways. Now, maybe you're thinking, "I don't know
if we could do calm and productive because we've got so much sibling rivalry." I've got
to tell you something, if you're family environment, your family culture is not fostering you to
into friendship, you need to pull away from all the distractions until it does. Pull away
from all the digital, all the TV. Pull away from so much friend time and time out of the
home. Focus instead all your efforts on getting those family relationships where they need
to be. Tell the children that when they are how they need to be then you can start adding
in some of those things again. Don't be afraid to tell people in your community and your
neighborhood that you're busy for a whole because you're working on your family bonds.
In fact, it'll probably just the example that other families need to hear too. Principle
number 2 for stopping those sibling rivalry problems is to have skills. People who live
on purpose have skills. So, you need skills too. So, what skills are best for handling
sibling rivalry? Well, there are 2 skills that I would recommend. Number 1 is accepting
"No" answers. Sometimes, somebody says, "I need you to be away from me." That's a No
answer. Or "No, you can't use my hairbrush" or whatever happens to be. And a person needs
to know how to accept a no answer. There are 4 steps to accepting a No answer. You look
at the person, keep a calm face, voice, and body; say okay or you ask to disagree appropriately
and then you drop the subject. Which means you don't take it anyway, you don't fight
about it. You don't try to make threats or blackmail someone because they don't give
you something that wanted to have. The second skill is disagreeing appropriately. A person
needs to know how to voice their opinion and be understood in a calm way. And the other
person needs to know the skill to so they can know to the other person instead of fight
with them and manipulate them. Usually, sibling rivalry is just power struggling. It's people
manipulating each other try to control the other person in some way. If we have skills
for how to communicate, and if we have a dedication to unity and to friendship and we're fostering
that as a family, then over time those little tendencies to bother each other soon go away.
If you've enjoyed this video about sibling rivalry, I know you'll love my next video
which is How Do You Control a Child With Behavioral Problems? Click that link. I know you'll enjoy
it.