Gen X parents with a trail of sibling scars in your own midlife family- want to make sure your own kids do not grow up with lasting brother or sister emotional or physical scars? Attend to wounds right away, and be there to referee the fights because they will come up all the time. Show a respect for each point of view; listen to both sides. Schedule time with your kids to do this if you work. Have children engaged in after-school activities so they don’t come home and argue in an unsupervised environment.

Family meetings are an excellent tool to let you listen to both sides of a sibling argument. They provide a safe arena where you can impose rules about each person taking a turn to express his or her viewpoint. Parents can also set rules in the beginning about no interrupting so each child can say what he or she has to say without another child butting in. At the family meeting you can ask each sibling to share his or her concerns and use the Go Around technique. .htm where each person at the meeting gets to respond to the topic. So if the Go Around topic was what happened this week that you didn’t like, and one sibling said something the other sibling did made him mad, the Go Around technique would give the other siblings a chance to respond in a really safe environment. You are listening to both sides of the issue.