How to Help Your Children Live Together So You Can Live Too
by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish
The goal of the Siblings Without Rivalry group workshop is to help you to help your children learn how to live together. Each session sensitizes parents to what it is that increases hostility between children and the attitude and the language that decreases hostility. During each session, parents will learn and practice specific skills that help to reduce friction and make harmony possible.
Participants will also have the opportunity to take a fresh look at their own adult sibling relationships.
See currently scheduled classes and register.
What Will Be Covered in Each Session?
1. Helping Siblings Deal with Their Feelings About Each Other
What happens to brothers and sisters when their hostile feelings about each other are ignored or denied? Four specific methods for helping children express their negative feelings to each other without doing damage.
2. Keeping Children Separate and Unequal
How siblings react when they are compared to each other-unfavorably or even favorably. Effective alternatives to comparisons. How siblings feel about always being treated equally. Ways to treat children unequally and still be fair.
3. Siblings in Roles
Why brothers and sister are often cast, and cast each other, into different roles. A look at how powerfully these roles affect their relationships with each other. Skills that free each child to become his or her most whole self.
4. When the Kids Fight
What can you do when fighting breaks out between the children? An exploration of commonly used strategies that backfire. A chance to practice the skills that reduce rage and motivate children to work out their own solutions.
5. Problem Solving
A method for helping children deal with the problems they can’t work out for themselves. A simple ten-step approach that enables adults to sit down with the young combatants so that they can move toward resolving their conflicts.
6. A Final Review
Time to review and consolidate your skills. Exercises give you practice in applying everything you learned to potentially explosive situations. Finally, an opportunity to take a second look at your own adult sibling relationships from your new perspective.
Class times and locations are listed on the Parenting Classes page.
