Managing Sibling Fights

And if you’ve been listening to this podcast, you know that your thoughts create your feelings and your feelings drive your actions. Okay. So an example would be, they shouldn’t be doing that. Not again. They should know better. Why does this happen all the time? Right? And each of these thoughts is gonna lead to a very specific feeling. And I think, you know, they shouldn’t be doing that which leads to frustration. Ugh, you guys, why now, if the sibling fight is particularly violent or rude, like just someone hitting someone, someone taking someone’s toy for us, our older girls, like swearing and saying something really cruel.

We have a different thought, like that’s terrible, or that’s a really scary behavior or, oh my goodness. I can’t believe she just did that. Like, we’re kind of surprised in a Gast and we often feel waves of guilt and shame like, oh my goodness, I must be a really terrible mom that the kids are doing that, being that physical, being that cruel. And so then you feel like a bad mom. You usually scream at the kids and it’s because it’s coming from this feeling of anger, frustration, embarrassment, guilt, shame, these like very big, big emotions. And we just lash out.

And recently I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD and I’ve been learning about how people with ADHD have this part of their brain. Well, rather they, they don’t have it that other people have, Ugh, it’s related to the limbic system, but that’s not the word. There’s this little part. And it also starts with an L. And basically what it means is everyone has strong emotions, this kind of pool of emotions and the Olympic system, but people without an ADHD brain have a dam. And so it gives them time to feel something and then assess whether it would make sense to share that feeling out loud or express it at a certain level. And so women who have ADHD either have a very small that thing or a, or it’s not there at all.

And so you would see the sibling fight, you’d feel this emotion and you would scream at them before you even realized what was happening. And then when the kids look scared or upset, it would hit you. Ooh, I probably shouldn’t have reacted like that. And so for all of us, I want you to know that these feelings that you have, these strong feelings that you have are coming from the thoughts you are thinking about the sibling fights, even though this happens in every single house at every single age, we still think that there’s a huge problem with it. And probably most of us make it mean something terrible about ourselves.

Okay. So that’s the first challenge with sibling fights are just a list of thoughts that you have. And if you wanna know what your thoughts are, get out a piece of paper, imagine a sibling fight, or just wait for one to happen. We know it will, and then write down either the feelings that you have. And then back into the thought like, oh, what was I thinking that led to that feeling? Or you might just be able to hear the thoughts just has to do with how practiced you are listening to your thoughts. The second reason why sibling fights are so challenging is because of their noise, just the sheer noise of them. And when you have a house that is full of a lot of unpredictable noise, explosive noise, disruptive noise, it’s like being on a battlefield and having bullets whizzing by your head. It triggers a fight or flight response. And for most of us it’s a fight response. It’s the yelling. Most of us don’t have the kind of fear where the siblings are fighting and we freeze. You might. And what that would look like is the kids fighting. And you just withdraw. You’re just like, I can’t do this anymore. And you go to your room or you get in the car and you leave.

You just check out. So you don’t even engage in them. That’s a freeze response. Another less common response is fun. Fawning. This is what I’ve read about recently. And what that would look like is, oh, calm down, you guys, I’ll go get you an ice cream where you just funnel over the kids in order to stop the thing that’s scaring you so that you are no longer in a stress response. So it may not be that you’re having these conscious thoughts about whether the kid should be fighting or not, or whether you’re a good mom or not. It might just be that the totality of noise that’s in your house is wreaking havoc on your nervous system. And you just can’t hang for it. You’re just too much in a stress response either for the day or for the week. And so you’re just having a fight or flight reaction to what’s happening. And so one, I just wanna give all of you a really big podcast hug. I love you. This is why being a mom earns us our sainthood stripes. It is not for the faint of heart. It is very challenging. It is very assaultive to our nervous systems.

Of course, it’s hard. I was not surprised at all that that was the number one thing that people struggled with at all. And so I think the first thing that we need to do is just normalize. Like, yeah, this is rough. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re not a way worse, mom. You don’t have way worse kids. We all have a bun bunch of kids that are just monkeys learning how to be good humans. And in the ages of zero to 25, they’re forming their prefrontal cortex and figuring themselves out. And so a lot of them are not really emotionally regulated. That is what they’re learning. So couple strategies,

I’m gonna go in on the noise one first, because if there is a significant amount of noise in your house and you are constantly in a fight or flight state and your system is being flooded with cortisol, you are terrible. I love you. You are terrible at problem solving. So we can’t even do the other thing. I’m gonna say, if you’re in a constant fight or flight state, you just don’t even have access to your problem solving brain. Okay? Now this may be happening in your house for lots of reasons, not just sibling fights, maybe it’s a teething child or a certainly teenager, or who knows why there’s noise, but just the total noise in your house might be beyond your capacity with your nervous system. And so your job is to get calm. You might need to schedule time out of the house with your husband, not with your husband, schedule it with him.

You leave, it could be in your car. It could be after the children go to sleep, you could wake up before them, but you need a time when you are not having a stress response, then you wanna problem solve it. Then you wanna ask yourself, whoa, what am I gonna do about the total noise level of my house? How am I gonna bring it down? And what are some strategies that I can use in the moment when I notice that I’m having a stress response? I covered this a lot in that workshop. So if you go to our website made for greatness.co, I will have it. I’ll have it right now at the top of the website, cuz we’re not running any other events. And then I’ll probably create an opt-in somewhere where you can get it. So if you’re listening to this like two years in the future, it’ll be somewhere and it’s called focused

And strategies might be breathing, stepping outside for a moment, drinking some water slowly, rubbing your arms, just giving yourself some skin to skin contact, to calm yourself down. Listening to some music, lighting a candle. There’s a lot of things we can do to bring our stress response down, but you cannot problem solve when you’re in that space. One thing that you can do is put children in different rooms. Hey, you guys, I’m really upset right now. I can’t even deal with this. I need you to go to your room. I need you to go to this room. I need you to be in the laundry room. I need you to be in the garage. I need you to sit on the brown couch. I need you to be on the white couch. I may or may not have been known to be putting all of my children in different areas so that the noise level was down.

So I could calm my nervous system down and then decide what I was gonna do. Whether it was to issue consequences or talk to them or who knows, maybe feed them. They’re just children. This is totally normal. It’s not a problem. But your brain doesn’t understand that when it’s like they’re bullets flying by me, I’m freaking out. We don’t tell young men on the battlefield, calm down. It’s fine. You have tools. We’re like, yeah, you’re in a fight or flight response. Okay? So you’ve gotta calm your nervous system down in order to be a problem solver. Okay. Then let’s go back to the first thing, which is that our thoughts are creating our feelings. So we can come in at a problem solving level, which is we can normalize the behavior. Oh yeah. I listen to that podcast. And Sterling told me that everybody is frustrated by sibling fights.

This is not a Jake family household problem. It’s like a parent who has children problem. It doesn’t mean my children are terrible. It doesn’t mean they’re gonna be garbage humans. I have a friend who has a super great relationship with her siblings. And I asked her about that. I said, were you guys mean to each other? And you were little. And she was like, so mean we were the meanest. I feel really bad actually about how mean we were. And I, so I just like have held that in my mind that the way that my children act together in my home is not a predictor of their adult relationships with each other, because that’s important to me that they have a good adult relationship. The other thing you can do is look for evidence that they are good friends. Like they do play together. They do have moments of connection.

So these are strategies to calm our brain down and say, Hey brain, actually, that’s not even true. This is normal. And they do like each other. It’s not a problem. The other thought I really like is I have a plan for this. And we get to think that thought when we create a plan. So one of the biggest challenges with sibling fights is you can’t tell me what the rules are. If you can’t tell me what the rules are, then your kids can’t tell me what the rules are. They just know that there’s a certain amount of noise, a certain tone of voice, a certain amount of physical touching. And sometimes they cross an invisible line and mom freaks out.

They know that they know when they’ve crossed a line. They don’t know. They don’t know the moment before they’ve crossed it though. Right? So I like to say in our house the little kids are not allowed to open the front door. I think under four, cuz now my well forest is four and a half. So now he still asks though, he goes, mom, can I go outside? I say yes. And then he can open the front door. That’s a very clear rule. You either are or not allowed to open the front door. The consequence is very clear. But with sibling fights, what are the rules? Well, you were a little mean, well mom, which word did I say? That was mean? Which moment was it? The tone of my voice? Well, you touched her. Well mom, sometimes I touch her and it’s not a problem. So why was that touching a problem? And so I think the challenge of sibling fights is the rules. The rule isn’t clear. And usually the consequence has not been told ahead of time. And so of course they’re confused. And I wanna say that that’s okay, but then don’t get so upset about the sibling fights. Just recognize it’s kind of a gray area and maybe they always get a warning for that, where you go, Hey, I don’t like the way that’s sounding. If you guys keep talking like that, I’m gonna split you up 10 minutes off your bedtime. Everyone’s gonna do wall sits. Not all of those things. I was just giving you examples

And then they know, Hey, something’s different. Mom’s already kind of paying attention to us. Maybe we should back it off. Cause that still wasn’t totally clear what I said. It wasn’t like, Hey, if you use this level of Dele, but you could give them a warning. Like, Hey, that thing that you were just doing, that’s it. Let’s not do that again right now.

So having a really clear plan in place for how you want to respond to sibling flights or creating rules, if you can, for example, I think we’d all agree. Like if you punch your sister in the face, you’re gonna get a consequence. That’s rarely what they’re doing though. It’s usually like little nudges or little shelves or little like, I don’t know, silly sibling things. So are you gonna have a predetermined rule about that? Are you gonna empower the children to say, Hey, it’s your job actually, to express that someone is touching you in a way that you don’t like, then the rule is if the other sibling doesn’t respect that warning, then there’s a consequence. So we may have been talking about this in Jake’s household recently. So my seven year old and my 11 year old, like to wrestle and play sometimes.

And then all of a sudden, the 11 year old will decide, oh, I don’t like it anymore. And then she gets upset at the seven year old. And so we said, Hey, do you want the rule to be, she’s never allowed to touch you. And she said, yes. But I said, then it goes both ways. They made it two days, two days and then they were touching each other again. And I said, see, I use it as an example. I said, see, you guys actually do like touching each other. It’s just that sometimes you wanna say stop or it’s enough. So we didn’t have that rule that they weren’t allowed to touch each other. And we innate, we empowered both of them to say stop. And then the other person needs to respect the stop or then there’s a consequence. So notice how that’s much more clear. Now I think speaking rudely isn’t as clear. And that’s when I say, Hey, I didn’t like the sound of those words or the tone of your voice. Maybe you can try saying this in a different way. So you can think about that. Remember, you’re gonna do your thinking and you’re planning when you’re calm. And then when you see the sibling fight, then you can think, thought I have a plan for this. And you will feel so empowered. I feel like such an empowered mom because I either have a plan for something or it’s new. And then I just think, oh, this is new. I’m gonna make a plan about that later when I’m calm.

It’s amazing. I am a very different person than I was two years ago. And I feel so calm and empowered in my parenting. And we hear that from our master’s members all the time. Wow. I am such a happier mom. It really is possible. And you know, you guys, I still have six little kids, but now I know how to manage our noise. I know how much I can allow and still feel calm. I know how to shut it off when they’re being too noisy and my noise bucket is full. I know how to communicate with them better. And I know how to communicate with myself better. So I think to sum it all up, sibling fights are challenging because we’re getting beat up on two fronts. We’re getting beat up in our own minds with our thoughts and we’re getting beat up by the noise. And then both of those things are happening in a cycle because the rules are not clear to the children. They’re not clear to the children. They’re not clear to us. And so everybody’s playing in this gray area and it feels unsafe. Children really love boundaries. They love clear rules and clear consequences. And then we love them too. And this is how you stop being a yelling mom, because you just decide ahead of time, how you wanna show up and you practice it and you have a plan.

And so do this, do this, this weekend, set, put it on your calendar. Those of you guys who don’t have jobs and don’t use your calendars very much, which is me for a long time. I want you to put a calendar, put an hour on your calendar that says, think about sibling fights, protect it, tell your husband you’re gonna be in your room or you’re gonna be in the car. You’re gonna leave and go to a coffee shop. And I want you to listen to this episode again and make a plan. And then I want you to send this episode to wait for it. Every single Catholic mom friend that you have, okay? Maybe not every but five, because you know that your five best friends are struggling with sibling fights. You know, don’t let this be a secret, like let’s create a movement for neutralizing sibling fights or handling them. Well, give this gift to yourself and give this gift to your friends. If this is the number one problem that everyone emailed me about how amazing would it be? If we just solved it this summer, we would just CRI plants. And we practiced them until we became moms who were like, oh yeah, siblings. Fight’s not a big deal. I know how to handle them. Pretty amazing. Huh. All right, you guys, I love you. I’m praying for you. And remember you are made for greatness.

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