Wouldn’t it be nice if we lived in a rainbow and butterfly world and never disagreed? There would be a lot less yelling and fewer hurt feelings that way. The truth is though, it’s not realistic. We’re all different and disagreements happen. They happen in the adult world at the grandest geopolitical scales and on the playground when Sally took the red shovel Jimmy wanted. That’s life!
The question becomes then, how do you help your child handle the disagreements you know are going to have with their friends and raise them up to be adults who can successfully handle these situations?
These five tips will help set you, and your little ones, up for success. Who knows, maybe they’ll even be ready for a career in diplomacy!
1. Press pause
As adults, we know how hard it can be to not get swept up in the moment and let our anger get the best of us. Check out basically any social media comment thread for proof. And that’s our behavior even with fully developed brains, imagine how much harder this is for children!
Tap into your children’s love of screen time and teach them to “press pause” when they are faced with a conflict. If they are having an argument with a friend or sibling, it can be very helpful to take a step away from the situation to think it through. Maybe this is a situation they can handle on their own, or maybe they do need an adult to intervene. A pause will help them figure it out and proceed with a cooler head. By reinforcing the “press pause” strategy, children can develop as problem solvers, and turn into adults who don’t hit send on angry emails.
2. Walk a mile in their shoes
Teaching empathy is another important element to helping your children learn to resolve conflict. When your child comes home upset about a disagreement with a friend at school, ask them questions about the experience.
“Why do you think Angie didn’t want to play with you?”
“How do you feel when someone else takes your favorite toy?”
“What do you do when someone makes you mad like that?”
Trying to understand their friend’s thoughts and feelings about a situation, putting themselves in their shoes, and then thinking through why someone might react in that way can be a complicated process. Those lessons in emotional intelligence aren’t taught in a textbook, but they are the foundation of relationships and worth the hard work to teach at home.
3. Talk it out
We can talk until we’re blue in the face about how to handle disagreements effectively, but if our children see us ignoring our own advice they are going to do as we do, not as we say.
Talk about feelings with your children and show them it’s okay to be emotional, parents experience big emotions too! Then model how to manage those emotions by having open conversations with your partner and children when disagreements arise. Use “I feel” statements that keep the focus on the emotions rather than placing blame and your children will learn to do the same. This is a much more productive strategy than finger pointing.
4. Work on compromise
Teach compromise as an exercise in being creative, because that’s really what it is at the core - creative problem solving! At home this might mean two siblings decide to take turns with a new toy, or that one sibling will pick the movie tonight and the other sibling can pick tomorrow.
Compromise does not come naturally to children, but it’s teachable, and with more practice on the homefront, your children will be more comfortable coming up with solutions with their friends. Then they’ll take those lessons with them into adulthood which we all know we could use more of. World peace, here we come!
