From downstairs, the sound of bickering, then howls of indignation. I stomp down the stairs and into the fray. “What?” I demand, giving them both my best stink-eye.
“He hit me!” wails the assaulted.
“He was teasing me!” counters the other.
“In this household, we do not hit,” I lecture. They’ve heard it before. “It is never okay to hit. Never. If you are frustrated, use your words. If using your words doesn’t work, what should you do?”
“Come and tell you,” they say in pouty unison.
“That’s right. If your words don’t work, you come and tell me or Daddy, and we will help you.”
**Fast forward two hours.**
I can hear the commotion escalating from downstairs. Right on cue, I hear the inevitable: “I’m telling!!”
One boy comes up, his brother right behind him. “Mom!” he begins.
I cut him off. “I don’t want to hear it. Go settle it yourselves. Now go away. GO!”
How long d’you think I can keep playing both sides against the middle? One of these days, this will surely come back to bite me in the ass…
I could have written this! Somedays I think I should get a tape recorder that will hiss “I was not there. SORT IT OUT YOURSELVES.”
And BITE it will… although I don’t have two the same age that fight I still hear some of my words coming back to bite me.
And you MY Dear just gave me fodder for a blog! Thanks… I will run off to the shower to ponder it.
Yes, yes it will….but I know no alternative 🙂
Lol! I know this feeling well. But as an elementary teacher I have 20 or more children dragging their squabbles to me every day and yes, sometimes I just can’t deal with it!
Our school has adopted a program called Kelso’s Choices (Kelso is a frog, comes with a series fo stories and stuff). Basically, it’s a series of choices you teach kids to use when they have a conflict.
They first decide if it is asmall problem (one they can try to solve themselves) or a big problem (one they need to tell and adult about — usually something that involves safety, as in someone is getting hurt).
If it is deemed to be a small problem, they try 2 Kelso’s choices (strategies) to solve it, and if it still isn’t solved, then they tell an adult. The key to this is that the adult (in our case teachers) always ask which 2 choices they tried, and then either help them choose a strategy that will work better (sometimes the one they pick isn’t best for the scenario) or wade in and mediate a settlement (and if they can’t agree on a settlement I usually send them to stand against the wall until they come to an agreement — which usually has them agreeing on ANYTHING pretty quick just so they can play again!)
You can see info about the program, and the 9 Kelso’s strategy choices here:
http://www.kelsoschoice.net/aboutkc.html
Oh, and of course we don’t introduce all the choices at the same time, and for home use you could pick just a few to use.
Marianne, that’s an excellent system! Thanks so much for the ideas, I’ll start using them right away!
I read this out loud to Beloved, who said, ‘You think we can force OC Transpo to use this to resolve the strike?’