Q: I need some help with my two daughters, ages 12 and 15, who seem to do nothing but squabble all the time. I have tried taking away privileges and grounding them. That doesn’t seem to work since each is always blaming the other for starting the battles.
A: Welcome to teenage parenthood. You are dealing with a combination of adolescent rebellion, sibling rivalry, turf boundary protection and peer influence.
As maturing young people, they are each trying to carve out a position, not only within the family, but within their social groups. Their arguing is part of learning to resolve disagreements. This learning is slow and often achieved through trial and error.
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The more attention you pay to their arguing, the more they will get you involved. With a parental audience on hand, they will try to make you feel responsible for what is really their responsibility. If you are around the home a lot, you are forced into being a referee for their verbal boxing bouts. If you are away from the house, you are called to be the judge but can only base your decision on hearsay.
All parents need to have basic house rules, which may include no destroying other people’s property and no physical contact. Even then, you can get caught up when they blame each other for breaking something or hitting them.
This is where honesty and truthfulness is important. Unless one of your girls has an exceptional poker face, you will likely, if you are patient and refuse to take sides at first, be able to guess accurately who is not being entirely truthful about an incident.
Here are some techniques that may help you gain some piece of mind.
- If necessary, use ear plugs to drown out their squabbling. What you don’t hear, you don’t automatically react to.
- Consider enforcing silent periods at home where nobody is to talk to anyone else for perhaps 10 minutes at a time, and if they need to communicate, write on a notepad. This gives everyone a rest or timeout.
- If they come to you with their dispute, give them a pen and paper and tell them to write down exactly what happened and what each of them said. This will stop some of the creative story telling. Then sit down with them and read both reports aloud to them.
If there are major discrepancies, tell them they each have to rewrite their reports until you can believe they are both reporting the same incident. Refuse to get involved until the two reports are reasonably similar.
When we write something down, we become more objective. We can then challenge ourselves instead of being challenged by others. If you use this process, I predict that, in time, they will stop involving you in their squabbling and resolveissues themselves.
Peter Griffiths is a mental health counsellor based in Prince Albert, Sask. His columns are intended as general advice only. His website is wwwsasktelwebsite.net/petecope.
