Take Your Sister with You
May 9, 2018 at 11:27 pm Leave a comment
I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, and she told me that her young daughters are constantly bickering and crying with each other and I thought about growing up with my sister. 
It seems like every time I left the house, my mother would say, “Take your sister with you”. I thought, “Why? She’s a crybaby!” It wasn’t until I went to college, that I discovered what a wonderful relationship I had with my sister and still do. I started thinking about sibling rivalry and what causes it, especially with girls.
Girls are allowed to be more emotional. I say allowed because behavior is learned, and if you get the attention of your parents by crying when things occur, then you’ll cry to get what you want. Make no mistake, boys do it too. It’s a great parenting idea to practice managing the emotions and the rivalry when they first occur because the longer you let it go on the harder it is to stop the behavior. Kids are brilliant! They watch us carefully and they know what we will respond to and what we won’t.
Try these three tips to help your children manage sibling rivalry:
1. When the whining and crying starts, have the girls sit down and talk with you about what’s going on.
2. Have them figure it out together without your involvement. Get them used to working through their issues with each other.
3. Put them in charge of each other. Usually the oldest is responsible for the younger sister.
On those occasions when the bickering doesn’t end, have your daughters take care of each other’s things by cleaning up each other spaces and doing each other’s chores. Create opportunities for them to spend even more time together as opposed to separating them when they can’t get along.
This is not an overnight parenting tip, and will probably take you several weeks before it begins to work.
Hopefully what you’ll see is that your daughters will start to rely on each other in a way you would never have imagined and the bickering will be a thing of the past.
Interested in learning more about your family’s dynamics? Contact me – Ms. Parent Guru to receive information about my inspiring parenting programs for Aging Parents, Mothers and Daughters, Mothers and their Sons, Fathers and Daughters or Fathers and their Sons.
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C. Lynn Williams, #MsParentguru
Family Dynamics Strategist, Author & Motivational Speaker
Entry filed under: daughter, family, Parenting. Tags: arguing, arguments, bickering, brothers, good parenting, parenttip, sibling rivalry, siblings, sisters.
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