180: How to get your children to stop fighting

Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive

If there’s one topic that never fails to rile parents up, it’s sibling fighting. Why does it affect us so much? (There are two main reasons.) Why is this happening, and what can we do about it? There are two main reasons, and one strategy to use with each reason. That’s it! There are NOT an infinite number of reasons why this is happening, or an infinite number of things to try to get it to stop. This episode will help you to identify the cause of the fighting, and how to make it stop. Sound too good to be true? It isn’t. Check out what parents have said about the workshop and sign up:

Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits Workshop

Do you have a child aged 1 - 10? Are they resisting, ignoring you, and talking back at every request you make? Do you often feel frustrated, annoyed, and even angry with them? Are you desperate for their cooperation - but don't know how to get it? If your children are constantly testing limits, the Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits workshop is for you.

Go from constant struggles and nagging to a new sense of calm & collaboration. I will teach you how to set limits, but we'll also go waaaay beyond that to learn how to set fewer limits than you ever thought possible. Sign up now to join the waitlist for the FREE workshop that will start on April 24, 2024. Click the banner to learn more:

Jump to highlights:

(02:07) Challenges of having multiple children (03:39) How parents' reactions to their children's fighting can be influenced by their own past experiences with their siblings. (07:00) The need to make pause before reacting to a child’s behavior (07:52) Understanding the causes of siblings fight (08:34) A fictitious story about a sibling fight to show two possible scenarios that may result from two opposing reactions from a parent (10:40) Scenario 1: Parent explodes and blames one child as aggressor during sibling fight (12:10) Scenario 2: Parent makes a pause, remains calm, does not blame anyone (15:00) Importance of having an empathetic discussion with your children (20:45) The struggles of Adrianna and Tim began when a new child was added to the family. (24:46) How Parenting Membership help Adrianna and Tim (25:54) Adrianna shares how bodhi shows his empathy towards her sister (27:35) How adding a sibling rocks an older child’s world (28:42) What are some ways to support our older child in managing challenging emotions so that they continue to feel valued and loved by us. (31:24) Sibling fight as a child’s unskillful strategy to getting their needs met (33:55) Figuring out the commonly unmet needs of our children (35:05) The answer to a child’s unmet needs: Spend 1:1 time with them (36:25) The importance of letting the child direct your ‘special time’ (37:48) Why parents shouldn’t treat all their children in the same way (39:16) Adrianna’s reflections [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Kelly Peterson 00:03 Hi, this is Kelly Peterson from Chicago, Illinois. There's no other resource out there quite like Your Parenting Mojo, which doesn't just tell you about the latest scientific research on parenting and child development, but puts it into context for you as well so you can decide whether and how to use this new information. If you'd like to get new episodes in your inbox along with a free infographic on 13 Reasons Your Child Isn't Listening to You and what to do about each one, sign up at YourParentingMojo.com/subscribe. If you'd like to start a conversation with someone about this episode, or you know someone who would find it useful, please do forward it to them. Thank you so much. Jen Lumanlan 00:55 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Your kids never fight, right? I didn’t think so. Of all the challenges that parents come to me with, sibling fighting is one of the biggest, and it seems like no matter what they’ve tried, it never gets better. A lot of these parents tell me they’re able to stay calm as their children start poking at each other, either verbally or physically, and even when tensions are escalating, and then eventually something explodes and they can’t keep it together any more and they scream at their kids to just stop it. And if their children WOULD just stop doing this, then of course our lives would be so much easier! So can they just stop?! Jen Lumanlan 01:34 I’m going to address the elephant in the room right up front and say that I’m a parent of one child, so I don’t have a problem with sibling rivalry. I’ve never wanted to have more than one child because I’m selfish and I like the life I have with one child, and because I know I’m a better parent to one child than I could be to more than one. And Carys has actually never wanted a sibling – we actually ask her, for fun, on a regular basis, just to see what she says, and she always says ‘no’ or buries her face in a pile of pillows or in some other way indicates that it would be a terrible idea. Jen Lumanlan 02:07 But I have worked with a LOT of parents who have multiple children, and who have used the ideas I’m going to share here in this episode and have found RELIEF from the seemingly endless sibling fighting. So I’ll walk you through how I worked with one family where the parents started out by saying: “My kids are always fighting and doing things to intentionally make the other one sad or scared. It’s really stressful and triggering for me. I can’t leave them together for 5 seconds because one of them will hurt the other one physically or emotionally. We might have the same exact two toys and they each have one, and then the other will just go rip it out of the other person’s hand and throw it across the room. And then it will end up getting physical. I’m having a hard time even going to the bathroom some days because I never know what’s going to happen when they’re together. Sometimes they can play together really well for a long time but then sometimes things go south immediately.” And just a few weeks after saying that, this parent’s still very young children were able to start addressing many of the challenges they were having between themselves, without the parent even having to be involved at all. So in this episode we’re going to talk through the factors that are involved in sibling fighting, which almost always go way deeper than whatever it is they are fighting about right now. There are two main buckets of factors – things that are going on inside us, and things that are happening for our children. It’s always easiest to focus on yourself first so let’s start there, and then we’ll move into what to do with your children. Jen Lumanlan 03:39 So starting with ourselves, we need to understand why we are having such a big reaction to our children’s fighting. And pretty often that happens for one of two reasons. The first of these is that we had a crummy relationship with our siblings. So maybe you were the oldest and you had to look out for the younger ones and they got to be kids and to push back and not be the responsible one, and you didn’t get to do that. You were the enforcer, you had to keep them in line because your parents were working or had mental health challenges or other things going on that meant they couldn’t fully parent their children. So you have a strained relationship with your siblings because of that. Or maybe you weren’t the eldest or the biggest and your older and bigger sibling used to beat up on you. That would have been a really difficult experience for you – you were probably afraid of your sibling, and tried to manage their feelings so that you wouldn’t set them off, and to a greater or lesser extent you lived under the threat of what this older and bigger person would do to you. So when your children fight with each other, even if it’s objectively a very little disagreement, you have a narrative in your head about how if you don’t stop this now, they’re going to end up in the same dynamic that you did, with the bigger stronger one beating up on the smaller ‘weaker’ one, and the smaller one is going to get hurt, perhaps one time and perhaps many times in the future. Jen Lumanlan 04:59 The important thing to recognize in this is that your children’s relationship is NOT the same as the relationship you had with your sibling. It REMINDS you of the relationship with your sibling because you have a heightened awareness of tension. All of your antennas are up and your radar is constantly scanning for any threat, and as soon as you see something that looks remotely like what happened between you and your sibling, your brain goes into that catastrophizing mode where you expect the worst. But that isn’t our children’s thing to navigate. That’s our thing to navigate. We need to address the hurt that we’ve experienced, perhaps through therapy, so their probably relatively small squabbles don’t turn into a massive thing for us. Not doing this healing work is always an option, but we may well find that you’re able to be around your children with more ease and calm if we do work on this. And even if we think we can keep a lid on it now, we may well find that the kinds of struggles they have in the future escalate and trigger us then, so figuring out how to cope with it better now could really stand us in good stead. Jen Lumanlan 06:01 So the other half of the stuff related to you is when you and your sibling or siblings had a great relationship. When you see your own children fighting, you again catastrophize and think, “Well, if they’re fighting like this now, how are they ever going to have the amazingly close relationship that I have with my siblings?” And we panic and think that this is a thing that needs to be fixed URGENTLY. Once again, this is our thing to navigate rather than theirs. Just because they are squabbling now doesn’t mean they won’t be amazingly close later. And conversely, if they AREN’T squabbling now, that doesn’t mean they will be amazingly close later. We can never know how our own relationship with someone else will turn out, never mind how the relationship between two other people is going to turn out. We think that if we can prevent them from fighting now we’ll be doing everything we can to make sure they get on with each other later, but we have no way of knowing this. All we can do is be here with what’s here now today. Jen Lumanlan 07:00 So whichever of these things is true for you, the best thing you can do is to create a pause between your child’s behavior and your reaction. You can use a lot of different tools to create that pause – parents I work with like to keep a hair tie on one wrist to remind them of their intention to be present with their children’s struggle, and before they do or say anything in these difficult moments they transfer the hair tie to the other wrist. You can write down phrases that are meaningful to you – things like “My relationship with my children is the most important thing,” and post them on sticky notes around your house so you can look at them when you need them. Creating that pause is a big part of what we do in the Taming Your Triggers workshop, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing else you can do. Another part of what you can do is to look at why your children are fighting in the first place and address THAT, and then you won’t find yourself in these difficult situations nearly as often. So that’s the second part of our episode here today. Jen Lumanlan 07:52 When I ask parents why their children fight, they often say: “It just comes out of nowhere,” or “It happens for any one of 300 reasons – one of them has something the other one wants, or one of them is building something and the other one knocks it over, or one of them finds something the other one does to be really irritating.” Jen Lumanlan 08:10 Once again, we can deal with these very different causes in different ways. The important thing to keep in mind is that when our children are doing this behavior we find it so difficult, it’s always always always an attempt to meet an unmet need. Our job is to be a needs detective to try to uncover the unmet need so we can help them to meet that need, and then they won’t fight as much any more. Jen Lumanlan 08:34 The main thing we’re looking out for here is whether the difficulties are happening in one or a few kinds of situations over and over again, or whether they’re happening seemingly all the time across multiple types of situations. Let’s start with the individual one off situations first, and I’m going to introduce children’s genders into a fictitious story just to make it easier to follow. This example is actually taken from my book, which now has a title! It’s called Parenting Beyond Power and is available for pre-order now, before it’s released on August 1! Jen Lumanlan 09:04 Let’s say your four year old son is building a really tall block tower in the living room while you’re in another room nearby, and your two-year-old daughter comes running in and all of a sudden you hear a big crash as the blocks hit the floor, and then your two-year-old screams which usually means the four-year-old has hit her. What do you do? Just take a moment to put yourself in that situation, or a similar situation you’ve had with your child, and imagine what you might do, and what you would say to your child. Jen Lumanlan 09:39 Okay, so let's give this a whirl. Let’s try and imagine together how this conversation might go. So maybe you come running into the living room and say: “Hey! Stop it! Don’t smack your sister like that! We do not hit!” Your son refuses to look at you, so you console little sister and say something like “There there; it’s OK; it’s not your fault,” and to your son you say: “What on earth were you thinking?” Your son still avoids looking at you and says: “She knocked my tower over.” Jen Lumanlan 10:08 And you had just about been able to keep a lid on your feelings up to this point but then it explodes and you say: “I don’t care! You can build another one! I know it’s hard to have something knocked down, but that’s no excuse. Don’t hit your sister! Go and sit in the corner for three minutes and when you come back, you’d better be ready to apologize to her.” Jen Lumanlan 10:26 Your son goes and sits in the corner and when he comes back he says something that sounds vaguely like ‘sorry.’ So it seems like the interaction is over, and that the child has learned a lesson but what has really happened here? Let’s walk this through step by step. Jen Lumanlan 10:40 So the parent came in and judged one child as the aggressor and the other the victim. The parent asked a rhetorical question about what the older child was thinking but they aren’t really asking to get an answer. The child is feeling unsafe in that moment and completely disconnected from their parent, so they’re not going to say anything...