Raised voices, squabbling, whinging, blabbing on each other. Does your family ever have those moments?

I don’t know about you, but my kids don’t always behave the way I would love them to. And usually, this is at the most inappropriate time for me. Countless times when the kids were small, they would fight or whinge in front of someone I was trying to impress. The harder I tried to cover it up, the more evident it became.

I think we can all relate to those embarrassing times or those moments when we get our identity from our parenting instead of from God and who He sees us as.

Last month whilst on holiday, I realized how I am raising world changers. I am raising my children to change the world. But as Mother Teresa once said, “If you want to change the world, go home and love your family”.

What was Mother Teresa implying? Sometimes it is easier to ‘put on a mask’ and treat other people nicely and yet be horrible at home. You can be fantastic to everyone else, but you have achieved nothing if you do not treat your family kindly and amazingly. How you act around your own family is who you are.

Several years ago, I wanted our family to do a heap of random acts of kindness to change other people’s worlds. When I stopped to look at our own family, I realized my kids were fighting a lot, and we were unkind to each other. We decided that we first needed to look at being kind to everyone in our immediate family unit. We spent a week focused on being kind to each other. This is where I begin when I consult with other families interested in raising kids who are world changers.

Below are ten suggestions we have discovered as a family to help the siblings’ get along’ and be kind to each other.

1. Pray for their relationship with one another, for genuine friendship. Never underestimate the power of prayer. (Mark 11:24)
2. Model the outcome you want. Your children imitate you, so if you are not treating other family members with respect and encouragement, your children follow you. During one season, I realized I was not giving Gary, my husband, the respect he deserved, and my children began picking up on that and not respecting him either.
3. Be proactive. Have a meal sitting together as often as possible, e.g. nightly. Do things just as a family without other people or friends, e.g. holidays, go for a walk, hike, an activity, play a game together. Doing things together gives a purpose and action so that it can distract from the emotional stuff. Encourage them to work together and brainstorm outcomes for problems or complete a chore together. On holidays, we encourage our kids to do activities together, e.g. walk together to get ice cream, learn a new activity together, etc. They have fun and see each other differently. Recently our teenagers learnt to scuba dive. The apprehension and exhilaration aided their friendship. Activities and challenges together, without parents, can be bonding.
4. Practice encouragement and gratefulness in your household. Over the evening meal, make it a habit for everyone to share their highlights and lowlights from the day and take turns encouraging and affirming each other. Celebrate the behaviour of your children that you are thankful for and grateful for. When we highlight and celebrate the great stuff, we shift the focus off the negative. Gratefulness is the antidote for bickering.

Three specific kindness ‘games’ we have played as a family are:

• • Every evening for a week, we would write every family member’s name on a slip of paper and put it in a bowl. Each family member would then pull a name out of the bowl. If you got your name, we would swap it. For the next 24 hours, you had to perform acts of kindness for that family member secretly, e.g. do their chore, write a loving note to put on their pillow, etc. The next evening at dinner, we would try to guess who our secret kindness performer was. (This had the added benefit of helping everyone to be kind to each other so that it was harder to guess who was your secret kindness performer.) Every evening, we put everyone’s name back in the hat/bowl and pulled out another family member’s name for the next 24 hours.
  • Have a specific object that everyone recognizes as a kindness tool. When you do someone’s chore, place that kindness tool at the place of the chore to say you have already done it for them out of kindness. Then it is their turn to be kind to someone else.
  • Have a jar on the bench/table labelled “acts of kindness”. Whenever any family member sees someone in the family being kind to someone, they write it on a slip of paper with the kind person’s name on it and put the slip of paper in the jar. At the end of the week, read out the slips of paper and celebrate all the kind acts. When the jar became full, we would go out and do something fun or get a treat, e.g. takeaway.

5. Limit screen time. Those times in our family when we have banned screen time (television, computers, gaming, etc.), we have noticed a remarkable difference after the first few days. The atmosphere has changed immensely, and we have seen the siblings play with each other and treat each other with respect. Try a week or fortnight with no screens and watch the difference.
6. Be aware of your children’s friendships. We are all affected by many things, and friendships can be crucial. Be mindful of who is speaking into your children’s lives and their impact. You may need to juggle activities to limit certain friendships for a season.
7. Look at your overall week and see if you need to limit activities. Are you too busy as a family? Do your children have too many activities and not enough downtime or time to ‘get bored’? Usually, you move through boredom to get to creativity and cooperative play.
8. Celebrate each other regularly. As a family, celebrate each person and their achievements. Have planned ‘spontaneous’ fun times when you celebrate and share what you love about each other.
9. Don’t encourage telling tales / dobbing on each other. When the children were younger, one of them intentionally made sure I knew what the sibling had been doing. I needed to stop this. Even though it was so helpful for me to be aware, it harmed the relationship and wasn’t beneficial to either sibling. It was not a great character quality, and I needed to stop it.
10. Serve together as a family. When you focus on other people less fortunate than yourselves, and you are helping others, the sibling differences fade away. The focus is jointly on helping others. If you need ideas on how your family can serve others, no matter your kids’ ages, please contact me.

I urge you to have a go at trying some of these methods in your family. Please comment below with any other ways you have found successful at helping your family be kind to each other.