Hearing Both Sides Of Your Children's Arguments

The Relationship Cure: A 5 Step Guide to Strengthening Your Marriage, Family, and Friendships

If you are a parent, you certainly understand that one of the toughest things about parenting can be making sure that you are showing no favoritism whatsoever, and of course, one of the toughest times to make sure you are not showing any favoritism is when your children come to you, hoping that you can help them resolve an argument the two of them are having; of course, more often than not, it will not actually be both of your children coming to you, asking you to mediate an argument (wouldn't it be nice if it was!), but instead, it is usually one child coming to you and complaining about the other. When this happens, the temptation can often be to assume that the child who came to you was the child who was wronged, but before you make this assumption, you will want to be certain to get both sides of the story.

The first step in making sure you hear both sides of your children's arguments is preemptive, as you should train your children to try to work things out on their own before they come to you; this concept, of course, can take quite a bit of time to gain traction with your children, but eventually you will begin to see the fruits of them working out problems on their own, which will keep you from having to get in the middle of things so often.

Even as your children start to get better at working out problems on their own, however, they will still sometimes come to you; if one child is coming to you and complaining about something the other child did, make sure you seek out the other child and get their side of the story, keeping accusation completely out of your tone, before you render any sort of judgment.

And more important than anything else, you need to grasp the idea that mediating is less important than using each instance as an opportunity to train your children to treat each other respectfully and to take care of problems on their own; after you have mediated the problem in what you feel is a just manner, reinforce with them how important it is to treat each other respectfully, and to learn to work out their problems on their own!