Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg need a timeout?
How to teach your kids to resolve their fights on their own.
Did you hear about this? Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that they will be fighting each other in an MMA style cage match.
I'm not joking. Apparently they are very serious about this.
It started as a bit of public bickering between the two on Twitter, as Facebook recently released a competitor to Twitter. Then, as these things tend to, the bickering escalated. Finally Elon challenged Mark to fight him in a cage fight.
Today I saw some photos of Mark Zuckerberg training with famous MMA champions, repeating that he is ready to face Elon Musk in what is being called the "Billionaire Bout".
We are living in a very weird world, aren't we?
While reading about this, I was struck with how similar this situation is to my 4 year old and 6 year old.
I was watching them play together today. First, they played very happily, sharing their toys. Then suddenly one of them did something that upset the other, and they started bickering. This bickering escalated, and soon they were tug of war-ing the toy. It kept escalating, until finally I had to jump in to prevent them kicking and hitting each other.
The problem is, I can't always be there, and I also don't want them to rely on me to stop their fights for them. I want to teach them how to get along without requiring me to referee them all the time.
That's why I really appreciated reading Chapter 6 of Siblings Without Rivalry today. In this chapter, they share their Five Step Process for Dealing with Sibling Fights.
What I love about this process is that it is designed to help kids learn to resolve their fights themselves. The more you use it, the less you'll have to use it.
You also don't have to act like an investigator to determine "who started it", you simply follow to process and leave it to your kids to resolve the situation.
In Chapter 6, they also explain how to identify how "serious" a fight is, and they share the Four Levels Of Sibling Fights (from Level 1, Normal Bickering, to Level 4, Definitely Serious), and how to use the Five Step Process for each of these levels of fighting.
Now, it might seem like kids just fight, and that they'll get over it, but often these small fights keep escalating, and become a major problem for the children:
Our tendency as adults is to make light of our children’s quarrels, to dismiss them as just ‘kid stuff,’ and hope that they’ll somehow blow over. But it’s important for us to be aware that some of the problems between brothers and sisters don’t ‘blow over.’ They persist and become a major source of stress and concern to the children.
That's why it is so important to know how to help you kids resolve these fights before they escalate into long term problems.
Discover how you can help your kids to fight less and get along better here.