How to Homeschool When Kids Have Bad Attitudes and Siblings Fight

Hi everyone it's Sheri from the blog ourlifehomeschooling.com where I share homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms. I want to talk today about how to homeschool when your kids have bad attitudes and siblings fight. If you're new to the channel my name is Sheri. I am a homeschooling mom to 10 kids. I'm married to my high school sweetheart Nelson. We've been married for 23 years. I'm a former public school teacher turned homeschool mom. This is our 14th year homeschooling. I love encouraging other moms on my YouTube channel and on the blog ourlifehomeschooling.com. If you're new here would you do me a favor and like and subscribe. I recently had a mom comment on one of my YouTube videos asking this question. Can you do a video or comment on how you deal with sibling fights and when they don't want to do their work sit down and do their work. Do you have any children that are less enthusiastic or maybe just rebellious in some cases. Quite honestly when I got this question it would be really easy to skirt around it and to not talk about this because there's not really an easy answer to this. But truthfully it's something that we as homeschool moms are dealing with every day and it's a normal part of what we do. We live in a fallen world. Our kids are not perfect. We're not perfect and because of that there can be conflict a lot of times and it can be hard to to deal with it. It can be hard to get anything done when kids are fighting, when kids have bad attitudes, when they don't want to sit down and do their work. So that's what my video is going to be on today and I'd like to encourage you if you are a mom who has been homeschooling for a little while, would you join in the conversation and leave a comment below just sharing with some other moms how you homeschool with sibling fighting or with kids having bad attitudes or kids that don't want to do their work. What are some of the solutions that you found that work for you? I did a video that was similar to this last week, seven steps to a peaceful morning time. I'll link that up here if you want to take a look and that might help you have some other ideas as well. In my opinion this looks different in different seasons. When your kids are all little the problems are over different things. So sharing or learning to obey and listen when you tell them something. Sometimes it's over just little squabbles where everybody wants to be first and you know I had this first and then he took it and when they get older I feel like it changes and sometimes it can be more like personality clashes or kids that just don't listen to you or don't want to do their work. So it changes and as you homeschool your kids or as you are a parent longer you also change. When my kids were really young I probably was a little bit firmer with them and had stricter boundaries just because they were learning everything. They didn't know how to do anything. You're kind of setting the foundation for everything. But as they grow older I think parents in general become a little bit more laid back and with experience you know which is a hill you want to die on and what are things that you're okay just letting go because you know it'll resolve itself. So handling conflicts in your home or in your homeschool is something that I think gets better with experience. You get better at it. Of course we're always learning and each child is different so that can be a little tricky but I think you do get better with experience knowing which are things that you really are worth addressing. So do you address it or not? This is a good question to ask. You know there's both sides of the camp where it's like you need to address conflicts and problems with your kids and then sometimes also it's good to just let them work it out and let them figure it out. A good rule of thumb that I have used especially when kids are quarreling, fighting, if it's something that's a matter of injustice then I address it. So if something is unfair for one child, if someone is being taken advantage of, if someone is always getting there first and the other person is younger and never can do it, if it's a matter of injustice then I think it's important to address it. And this is usually younger kids and then if it's a matter of just personality clashes you know sometimes you just have one child that just really picks on another and the other child's just oversensitive or or maybe you have a child that's really neat and the other person is just so sloppy and always gets their stuff and moves it and you know there's all different kinds of personalities and sometimes those are worth addressing but often those are also ones that you can give them the general principles about how to deal with people with different personalities or how to treat people that are different than you but sometimes it's good to just let them work it out. And as a parent with more experience I think you learn when that's appropriate. Now this is a rule of thumb that I use regarding conflict between siblings but what if the conflict is between the parent and the child? In this case I think that the underlying tone in the house has to be one of respect for you as their mom, for you as their teacher, and for the rules of the house, the general rules of the house. And if a child is just not being compliant, not willing to to listen to anything you have to say, then obviously this has to be addressed. This is very important and worth addressing. You really can't make much progress at all if you have a child that's just completely disrespectful to you and to the expectations of the home. I do have a couple suggestions that I thought of as solutions that I've used over the years. When you've been a parent for a while or been homeschooling I think initially you really think about this more, you strategize more, you read all the parenting books, and then after you've been doing it a while you kind of mesh into your style and what works for you. And so you almost have to think to what you do, think back to what you do, or look at what you do and and how you resolve things. So I've thought of a couple things that I've tried that are helpful for us. And if you can try to stay to the end of the video to the very last one because this one is definitely the most important one and the one that I think specifically to homeschooling has made the biggest difference. The first is pretty obvious. You really need to have clearly defined boundaries and expectations. The kids need to know what to expect throughout the day. They need to know what's okay, what's not okay, and sometimes it might even be helpful to just write it out. And then it's important to also have the same expected consequences so that when they don't follow the rules, don't follow what's expected, the same consequences happening every time. And it's not just all over the map. Consistency is so important. The second is when you feel things escalating in your home with your kids, to be the first to set the example and try whispering. And I'm not talking about a passive aggressive whisper. I'm talking about actually calming yourself down and being the first one to control your emotions, stay calm. And I have found sometimes when I whisper to my kids, all of a sudden all the yelling and fighting that was going on just slowly comes down and de-escalates. And then sometimes my kids will whisper back to me not even realizing what's happening. But being the first one to set the example and to calm your spirit down often reflects in them. The third is to separate them from the situation. Sometimes no matter what you do, you know, things just kind of get out of hand. Everybody's upset and everyone just needs to go their separate ways and calm down for a few minutes. So this has really worked for me on many occasions. I'll just have someone go to a room. I'll have two different kids split up or even if it's between me and a child for us to just walk away for a few minutes and to calm down to not to do something else and then come back and talk about it together. The fourth solution that I've found, and this is really really helpful when you have young kids especially, is to keep your kids near you. So if you feel like there's just been a lot of fighting going on lately and kids just getting upset easily, getting frustrated easily, try sitting at the table and having them all around you and just keeping them all in that same space. Now we do this already for morning time and read aloud time, but my kids do have independent work in there. But if there's just a lot of squabbling going on, you can keep them with you even when they're doing their independent work and just make sure you are sitting there. They're all around you. That way you know we tend to easily get distracted with like changing the laundry over or washing up these last few dishes or changing a baby's diaper and of course some of those things have to be done. But staying with your kids and staying beside them, you're just able to keep tabs on some of these things and kind of prevent it before it starts. The fifth is to separate your kids and this applies I think more to older kids when they're doing some of their work that they do on their own. I sometimes have our kids work at a desk in their room and that way it's quiet you know they're not distracted as well so that's kind of another benefit to it. But they're able to just focus and get their stuff done in a quick way without having the distractions of everyone else which can also sometimes lead to some of those problems of them not getting along. Another suggestion is to strategize with your spouse and I say this specifically for boys. We as moms we think of everything from the perspective of being a female and we're very different from boys and especially when you have older teenage boys and I think asking your husband can just help you find solutions that would work well for boys. Sit down and talk together about ideas of things that you can try that would help bring more peace into your home. My husband understands our boys so much better than I do and some of the ideas he's had um you know boys are so much more physical they need to be up they need to be moving around and sometimes that physical energy just needs to be let out and it can come out in the form of anger at siblings or anger at me. Another solution is just the obvious talking to your kids about their tone of voice, about being kind. You know if you're a family that reads scripture together then this is going to be something you come across all the time. Verses about loving your neighbor and putting others first, thinking of others as better than yourselves. So these are conversations that if you're having in your home regularly through good books and through reading the bible together then it's going to be a conversation that you have and something that they're thinking about a lot. The last solution and one that I think has been the most effective in our home school is the idea that the home atmosphere and the character of our kids is more important than school work. So if we are having a lot of conflicts, if the kids are having bad attitudes, if they're constantly fighting and it just seems like we can't get anything done or the day is just a drudgery because there are just eruptions everywhere of you know people not getting along. I have, I've actually taken a school book, closed the school book right in front of the kids and looked at them and said your character and the peace in our home is more important to me than this school work. The way you talk to each other, you guys are siblings, you should be best friends. These are relationships you have for life and the way you treat each other, the way you talk to me is more important than any of this school work and I think as moms we think that we can't stop the school day for things like this that you know if we have all these problems that we're doing something wrong when really sometimes we just need to stop doing school and focus on our home and our family first and if that means a whole morning off, a whole day off to just make meals together and clean the house together and get our family back in a healthier better place then I think it's worth it because it's going to pay off over the long run when you can get more school work done later on. Trying to handle all these conflicts when it's just escalating and they're not resolving themselves, you're just going to be spinning your wheels whereas if you just stop, stop school work for a day and focus on your family and I also want to encourage you to persevere. There are no answers sometimes to the conflicts like these that happen in our home. There's no solution that's just you know I think sometimes people just see someone else and they're homeschooling for a long time or they're doing it pretty well and they think that they must not have any fighting in their home or they must not have these problems or their kids don't have attitudes like this and that's not true. We all have normal kids and we're all normal people and these things happen and it's just a part of the job and we just have to get our head in the game and keep going knowing that this is part of it and we're going to handle it we're going to address it and we're going to move on we're going to keep moving forward because we know that what we're doing the homeschooling that we're doing we believe in it we believe it's good for our kids so we're just going to move forward. I hope this has helped you. If you would do me a favor I would love to have you comment below especially if you have experience with this. Let us know what's working in your home. Thanks for watching today. I'll see you next week.