Create your parent-digm shift.

WHY DON’T MY KIDS GET ALONG?

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“As long as everyone is getting along, I feel great, but as soon as my kids start fighting, all hell breaks loose and I feel like I’ve failed as a parent,” says a mother of three.

What is it about the sights and sounds of conflict that can arouse such pain in us as parents? How can we help our kids decipher their conflicts with each other without hindering them or interfering with their own abilities for resolution?

And how do we respond to our kids in such a way that we unintentionally create rigid roles...good guy, bad guy, victim, aggressor? How can we learn to distinguish between conflict that needs our guidance and one that calls for  good boundaries?

Depending on our own backstory, parents often react to kids’ conflict in ways that have some association to our own memories of how conflict was confronted, dismissed or perceived in our own families of origin. Some of us see ourselves in one of our kids, and assign a victim role, for example, if we felt victimized in our own life. Things can become complex when sibling stress escalates to the point of emotional or physical pain. How do we respond accordingly? What do we make of teasing, bickering, aggression? And how can we turn it around?

We talk about the roles we play, the roles we perceive our children play, and the ways in which we can break free of old scripts so that our kids can be free to use conflict as a teacher instead of internalizing it as a source of pain.