How to get your kids to stop fighting

Many parents say: “My kids fight all the time and it drives me crazy!! What do I do? How do I get my kids to stop fighting with each other?” If you are one of those parents, try some of these ideas:

1. First, understand that siblings fighting with each other is perfectly normal. Nothing has gone wrong. You don’t need to blame yourself. But if you still want to change how much they fight with each other, here are a few suggestions.
2. Determine what kind of fighting it is (Issue fighting, Boredom fighting, and Attention fighting) and then deal with it accordingly.
3. Lastly, understand that it is not the kids’ fighting that drives you crazy, but YOUR THOUGHTS about their fighting that is driving you crazy.

Kids fighting with each other is normal

First thing is that siblings fighting is perfectly normal. Don’t beat yourself up for it. If you want to, you could just say to yourself: “Nothing is wrong here.” That is a perfectly fine solution. But if you want to decrease their fights and help them be better friends, here are some more suggestions.

Determine what type of fighting it is, then deal with it accordingly.

This information comes from the chapter “How to deal with Fights and Arguments” in Dr. Alvin Price and Jay A Parry’s “Discipline 101: Alternatives to Nagging, Yelling, and Spanking.”

So sibling fighting comes in three forms, and each kind requires a different response.

1. Issue Fighting
2. Boredom Fighting
3. Attention-Seeking Fighting

Issue Fighting

Issue Fighting revolves around a legitimate concern. The kids start fighting over an issue of right and wrong, or should and should not.

Some examples of issue fighting might be:

How to solve Issue Fights

To solve issue fights, sit down with the children involved when everyone is ready to talk. This means you don’t talk right after a blow up! Set a time later on when everyone is calm. When everyone is ready to talk, let each child have a turn to express their opinion. As the parent, you can validate each child’s feelings. After each child has had their turn to express their opinion, you can ask the children for any ideas of how to solve this problem. Let them brainstorm. Help them come up with a compromise or a new rule for the house that would solve the issue.

By solving the issue and setting a rule, the parent is able to remove himself or herself from the fight and let the situation run itself. You are also teaching children that productive discussions happen best when everyone is calm. You are demonstrating to your children how to problem solve: by letting each person have a chance to express their view, validate the other person’s viewpoint, brainstorm solutions, and compromise.

Boredom Fighting

Boredom fighting happens whenever kids are so bored, they would rather pick a fight and watch their sibling get mad than sit there bored.

The solution to boredom fighting is to give your children something enjoyable to do. If they geniunely enjoy the activity, then there won’t be fighting. Or you could wear them out with physical work and chores.

But for me, I feel like a lot of boredom fighting happens in the car, but what can you give the kids to do in the car? I’m not really sure – so if you have a suggestion, give it in the comments! 🙂 I suppose you could turn on an audio book, songs, try a car game, or give the kids ipads or a movie. Or food.

If work or fun don’t solve the problem, then it probably isn’t boredom fighting. See if there is an issue involved. Or most likely, it is attention seeking fighting.

Attention Seeking Fighting

This is the most common type of fighting that parents will see. It occurs in all sorts of places – at home, on outings, stores, etc. Kids love attention. Your attention. So they will do basically anything to get it – even slug their sibling and cause havoc.

Attention seeking fighting is easy to spot because there is no issue involved and the kids aren’t bored. So the only option left is that they just want attention

The solution to attention seeking fighting is just to ignore it. When kids fight for attention, just leave the room. Don’t become a referee or a judge. Just leave.

If you ignore their attention seeking fighting completely, and try to give them lots of positive attention when they are doing things right, the behaviors that get attention will increase in frequency and the behaviors that don’t get any attention will decrease. This is called positive reinforcement and extinction. There are TONS of books and articles that show that this principle is true. If you want to learn more about this, check out Glen Latham’s Parenting with Love and Positive Parenting books. But there are tons of parenting books and programs that teach this principe: ignore the bad, praise the good.

Remember: Ignore the bad, praise the good.

Understanding what really drives you crazy about the fighting.

Parents will say: “My kids fighting drives me crazy!” I like to challenge that thought. If you think about Brooke Castillo’s self-coaching model, no outside circumstance has the power to make us feel a certain way. It is our thoughts about that circumstance that make us feel a feeling.

So remember the self-coaching model:

CIRCUMSTANCES can trigger…

THOUGHTS which create our…

FEELINGS which drive our…

ACTIONS which produce our…

RESULTS.

The self-coaching model

So the circumstance in this situation is that your kids are fighting. We could even make it a little more factual by saying that your kids are making noise or hitting each other or saying certain things to each other. (because the phrase “kids are fighting” could mean different things to different people so we want to make it as factual as possible.) What is your thought about the circumstance? Whatever you are thinking is causing your feelings about it, so we need to look at your thoughts.

In this situation, your thought is causing the annoyance, not the actual behavior of the kids. So what is your thought? Perhaps you are thinking “This is annoying”. I will use this thought for my example, but you could plug any of your thoughts into this model.

C (Circumstance): Kids are making noise

T (Thought): “This is so annoying” *how do you feel when you think this thought? I feel irritated so I will put that in the next line.

F (Feeling): irritated *What do you do when you feel irritated? Write that in the next line.

A (Actions): Get angry at the kids, yell, tell them to stop

R (Result): You are annoyed with the kids, probably annoyed with yourself and your relationship with the kids is probably getting worse.

We can change our results by changing our thoughts

Even though circumstances can trigger thoughts, if we start to become more aware, we can actually CONTROL our thoughts and thus start changing our feelings and actions and results.

So we can take the same circumstance above, but let’s try to think a different, believable thought.

C: The kids are making noise

T: This is totally normal for kids.

F: calm

A: You try to stop the fighting through different methods, but you are calm the entire time you do it.

R: Perhaps the kids will stop fighting, but either way, you are calm and peaceful and in control.

Conclusion

So in this article, I have given you some suggestion for how to get your kids to stop fighting and some suggestions for how to start being aware of your thoughts about the situation and how to be more intentional about how you think. What are your thoughts about this article? Let me know in the comments below.