How to Build Healthy Sibling Relationships

We tell our kids, you are brothers and sisters. These are the friendships you're gonna have for life. My husband and I will someday not be here, but they will always have each other. And we want them to be good friends. Welcome to Our Life Homeschooling. My name is Sherry, Christian, wife to my high school sweetheart, Nelson, and thankful mom to 10 incredible kids. I'm the author of the blog and YouTube channel, Our Life Homeschooling, where I share homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms. I believe that motherhood is ministry and homeschooling is simply an extension of parenting. My passion is to cheer on other moms who are at home doing the most important work of all, raising the next generation for the glory of God. Hi, and welcome to the Our Life Homeschooling podcast. This is episode number 64, where I'm talking about how to build healthy relationships among siblings. In this episode, I'm gonna be answering a viewer's question about how to help your kids become better friends. And then at the very end, I'm gonna answer a couple questions that were left over from the last Q&A that I promised to tack on to this episode. So we'll get to that after we talk about our kids and their friendships. Before we get started, if you enjoy the podcast, I wanna remind you that you can find it on Apple or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If this podcast has encouraged you, would you take just a moment to write a review and better yet, share the podcast with a friend who could use some encouragement in homeschooling? I recently had a viewer ask this question. Can you do a video on how you taught your kids to be good siblings with healthy relationships? And also maybe obedience. Those are two areas that I think are the hardest for me with my boys. This is a great question and it's something I felt like I could get into a little bit more deeply than just simply leaving a response on a YouTube comment. So it's gonna be the topic of today's podcast. It's really important to us that our kids become good friends. And I think this is a benefit of homeschooling. They spend so much time together. But it can be challenging because any normal siblings are going to bicker and there's gonna be some arguing. And I think we as parents need to gauge what is okay and appropriate and when it's gone just a little bit too far. I wanna start with one of the things that I think has helped our kids the most and that is that we just do so much together. We have a lot of shared experiences. Over the years, we read aloud together on the sofa every afternoon. And so in the books that we've read, we've been different places and we can sit and talk about the things that we learned or remember from those stories. We've been on lots of field trips together. We've been exploring and we go on hikes with our co-op. And so we've just done a lot of things together. And I think that's pretty typical of most homeschooling families. That is one advantage that we have and that does tend to help siblings become close. Now, I know I've had some people say or ask the question, I've pulled my child out of school and she doesn't like being around her siblings. How can I encourage this? And I think this has to be approached almost similar to the way that when you bring a child home from school, you go through a period of de-schooling where you just relax and get used to being a family together, spending time, a little bit of time reading together, watching a documentary, and not following a rigid school schedule, just figuring out a brand new routine for your family. It almost has to be the same way for a child that is learning again how to be good friends with their siblings. Having shared experiences is one advantage we have as homeschoolers, but I wanna share with you a couple of things that have specifically helped in our family to help our kids get along. One of them, and it relates to shared experiences, is to work together as a family. And this is something that since we grow a lot of our own food and we do a lot of preserving, we have done a lot of working together. We have an applesauce day. This is just one example. Every September, end of August, September, and it's a two-day weekend. My husband's parents come and we start early in the morning and we work all day for two days. It's really exhausting. But there's just something really unique about the whole family working together toward a project, especially when that project is providing for the family. So we make 10 bushels of applesauce for our family. Then we make three bushels of applesauce for our in-laws. And so it's just a unique experience when everyone's working together to help each other. And maybe for your family, you don't do any kind of preserving like this, but you could go serve in some capacity in your church, serve as a family. Or you could go help an elderly neighbor clean up their yard. Anything that you can work at together as a family is something that builds stronger bonds among siblings and among the family in general. Another tip is to simply not allow any kind of name-calling, bullying, pushing, hitting. This is something that we just don't allow because we tell our kids, you are brothers and sisters. These are the friendships you're gonna have for life. My husband and I will someday not be here, but they will always have each other. And we want them to be good friends, to be courteous and thinking of the other person. And so when kids are fighting, there's a certain level of arguing or disagreeing that we're okay with letting them work through it, but it is not allowed to get to a level that becomes physical or even just mean and hurtful verbally. So that's something that we've just told our kids it's not allowed. That doesn't mean it doesn't ever happen, but everyone knows that when it gets near that point, we are stepping in and now it's become a serious matter and we are gonna take care of it. So just don't allow any of that kind of mean backbiting pushing, hitting. That is a place where you as a mom need to step in and take charge and teach your children what is okay and what is not going to happen in your family. Another thing that's helped me is sometimes the arguing, it's hard to know exactly how to handle it. And often it's one child that is just the troublemaker or is having a hard time. And as a mom, sometimes we just need to determine is this child tired? Is this child need just some quiet time by themselves? Sometimes they just are in a bad mood. They're not able to snap out of it. And when this happens, I will have that child separated from the group and they will become my personal partner. They will follow me around and do my work with me for as long as it's needed. I have seen this somewhere referred to as tomato staking. I don't know if that's the best word for it, but I do like the image. If you have a garden, we have a garden, and they just, they need that support until they don't need it anymore. So I'll bring the child that is having a hard time along with me. They'll help me fold the laundry. They'll sit beside me if I'm doing the bills or doing some kind of work that I need to get done online, paying something, anything like that. That child will be beside me. If I'm out in the yard, they will be out there with me, and they'll be with me as long as it's needed. And usually they get bored and they'll work, do some of the work I'm doing with me, but then they would rather figure out how to be nice and how to get along with their siblings than to have to do extra work with mom. So that has worked for us as well. And another thing that we have with our kids, they share bedrooms. And I just think this is a great way for them to form close friendships. The girls' room, I can hear them sometimes late at night, they're talking together, and they are just sharing personal things, and sometimes having funny things happen late at night, you get silly. Learning to share a bedroom with someone, you learn so much about yourself. You learn that you're not as neat as you think you are. You learn to respect someone else's space. You have to learn to work together to clean your area, and that is challenging. But learning to work together with other people, and sometimes people that are difficult, if you're a clean person and your roommate is not as clean, or if you're not a clean person and they like things a certain way, it's a good skill to learn how to work together in that way. So we love that our kids share bedrooms. We like our older girls to share rooms, and then our younger girls to share rooms, older boys, and then younger boys. It just makes it a little bit simpler, and they can relate more with kids their ages. And plus, they're just in developmentally different places, so that's worked well for us. That people say they want their kids to each have their own bedroom so they can have their own space, but that's not possible for everyone, and I just wanna add that it's actually really good for kids to share bedrooms. Our kids have loved having siblings to share bedrooms with. Now, they may not say that at every moment, or in the moment they're not getting along with their sister or whatever, but I think looking back in retrospect, they just talk about so many memories, and those memories were shared and close because they shared a bedroom. Something else I've noticed with our kids is that the more they're on screens, the more they tend to argue. Being in front of a screen is flashy, it's exciting, it draws you in, and all of a sudden, your sibling who wants to play solitaire or war or Dutch Blitz with you is annoying. And so screens, we've just experienced that when kids have been on screens, the longer they've been on screens, the more annoyed they get with their siblings. So limiting screen use has been so helpful. In our family, typically our TV is off, and then the older kids ask to get on for various things that they're looking for intentionally, but the younger kids are off screens. We have screen days, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, where they each get their allotted time to play video games. So they have time for getting on screens, but it's limited. And one thing that I have loved is having days that are completely screen-free. So if our screen days are Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, that means that the other days, they don't even ask because they know it's not a screen day. And when you have screen days, it's also helpful for kids to know when their screen time is because that will help them to not be asking all day. If it's something we do at the end of the day, before bedtime, then they won't be asking all day because they know that we do it at that time. So just making that a little bit more specific. And then we give our kids screen time really based on age. So the youngest kids have the shortest amount because they don't need a lot, and then the older kids have a little bit more. And this doesn't include when I'm making dinner. Every evening, my husband and I will usually be in the kitchen talking, catching up, and we allow the kids to watch a show during that time. It's just perfect time for them to relax. But as far as interactive screens where they're playing video games, these we limit. And one of the reasons is because our kids just get along better when they don't have a lot of screen time. Today was one of those wonderful days. I remember my older kids doing this so many times. And today, our younger kids did it. It was the afternoon, just some downtime, and they got together and decided to put on a play. So they spent an hour. They put a table in the living room and chairs. They made it into a restaurant. The tablecloth, they had ketchup and mustard and salt and pepper. And they asked me and our 15-year-old to come and watch their play that they had put together. And it took about five minutes for them to perform it. And it was really funny and cute, but it had taken an hour of their time imagining it and putting it together and practicing. And they only did that because there wasn't a whole lot to do. It was here, it was a quiet afternoon, we weren't on screens, and so they had this idea. The next one goes a little bit back to the idea of having shared experiences together. And this one's kind of obvious, but just to play together. Life shouldn't be all hard work. We should be having fun with our kids. So just going out in the evenings, playing volleyball together, going to, a couple weeks ago, we went to a pickleball court and we were having fun out there. Playing card games, it doesn't have to be anything exciting or expensive, but just relaxing. Sometimes for us, it's just relaxing in our room and our kids wanna talk to us and ask us all kinds of questions. Or we'll go and screen share some old photos on our phone and the kids love looking at the old videos and pictures of 10 years ago when they were all little. So having fun together as a family gives them a broad foundation and it makes them want to defend their siblings when they're in a situation that's compromising because they've spent so much time with them, working with them, playing with them. And just because your kids are very close doesn't mean that they don't have other friends. Our kids have friends, their own age, at church, at co-op, they're going to birthday parties. When they have birthday parties here, they have a lot of kids that they can invite over that are their age, that they have those friendships. But homeschooling has allowed them to have their siblings as some of their closest friends. And the reason I think that makes such a big difference is because your siblings are friends you will have for life. Other friends come and go, but you will always have your siblings. And childhood really is just a very short time that you have to invest in those so closely. So it's worth taking advantage of this time. So it's worth taking advantage of this time when your kids are all at home to help them form close friendships. And the last tip that I have that has been really good for us is to make sure you're reading the Bible to your kids. I remember very specifically one morning, it was one of those mornings when everyone was at each other, where I woke up in a great mood. I'm happy and just woke up on the right side of the bed and the kids did not. They were all at each other. It was kind of ruining my morning, but we did our regular routine. We had our breakfast. We sat down for morning time. I opened up the Bible and the verse we came to was be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ Jesus has forgiven you. And so this has always been a part of our morning reading scripture. And I have had this experience more than once where my kids have been arguing and we'll open the Bible and read a verse that specifically addresses what's going on. And it just softens their heart towards their siblings, helps them to be more long-suffering and forgiving. So reading the Bible to your kids as a habit is also going to keep them on the right track and remind them that we should be loving each other the way that Christ loved us. So I hope that helped give you some ideas of how you can encourage your kids to be close friends. I'm gonna move on to some of the questions I had in the last Q&A. My question is, how do you fit in everything to be done by lunch? We rarely ever want to do school after our nap, quiet time since we've been doing school all morning. I've made and read made our schedule over and over and we rarely stick with it. I think I'm adding too much to our days. How often are you reading science, history, et cetera to your kids? And then she just goes on with some more questions. Is that enough? There are so many good books and I don't feel like I will get to them all if I'm only reading a small section once a day. So this is a very packed question and I wanna say, first of all, that we are not done by lunch. The kids are done with their independent work by lunch and that is all of our elementary kids. So some of our high school kids still have some things that they're working on after lunch, depending on the day. It's really hard to calculate because our high school kids also work. So sometimes they're working all day and then they come home at night and they're just doing their schoolwork at night. So it's not like cut and dry. Every day is the same once they get to high school. But we are not done completely with our schoolwork by lunchtime. I spend some of the time in the afternoon reading aloud to our kids. And I would say this lasts anywhere from probably a half an hour to 45 minutes. Sometimes it's gone more than that. And I will usually read a book for my older kids and a book for my younger kids. And I will often fit in a science reading or a history reading in there as well. But I don't do a science reading every day. I don't teach science every day. And I feel very confident about this because we're able to get most of the way through our science curriculum just with the reading part of it without doing it every day. And also, I remember when I was teaching in the school system, which I personally don't think is the gold standard. I think homeschooling is the gold standard for education. But if you wanna look at something to compare it to, I remember they did one block in the afternoon that was a content area. So either science or history. And they would do a semester of only history. So for that semester, the kids were not getting science during that block. And then in the spring semester, that content block was just science and they were not getting history or vice versa. So you don't have to do history readings every day. You can break it up how you want. Of course, you need to make sure you're meeting the requirements by your state. And that's something that we do. You can really break it up how you want. And another way I get some of these things in is to assign some of these books to my kids to read on their own, specifically history. I have a lot of supplemental history books that I really want my kids to read that maybe at one time I read aloud, but it's not one we're reading this year and I still want them to get it. So I'll assign that to them. And I would just be careful of putting too much on your plate. Too much is actually doing, you get more done when you take things away. Because if you have overloaded your schedule, your kids are exhausted, their brains are tired. You may be putting out a lot, but they may not be soaking much of it in. Whereas when you keep your lessons short, when the kids are engaged, then they just pick up on so much more. And I'm not saying that you shouldn't challenge your kids, because that is something that is really important to me. I always want to be challenging them, but I want it to be right at that level where enough is enough and we don't go above it. They're being challenged just, and as a mom, I think you know what that is. You know that level where it's just enough, but not too much. And I think you can see it in your kids' eyes when they're exasperated. When you are doing all the output and they're not doing much, they're not taking in very much. I think that's often a good sign for me. Now it doesn't mean that sometimes you don't have to just work hard and the kids are, you know. We have times where they're just not taking things in no matter what because they're not in a good mood or you know, whatever. And it doesn't mean that you don't just continue working. But I'm talking about putting too much on your plate that it's just more than they can take in. Short lessons, consistency, that's what we aim for. I would love some advice about transitioning from a relaxed kindergarten to a more formal education year. So she is doing Ambleside Online and she did year zero last year and now she's gonna be moving into year one. Ambleside Online is a free Charlotte Mason curriculum. It's pretty much the spine of what we do although we have become very relaxed about it. After I did almost all the books with my oldest child, I learned which things we really enjoy and which that I feel comfortable taking out. My advice would be to just make small changes. One change that really helped us is having a morning time every day. Morning time helps you to get in those daily subjects and then also the subjects that you teach on a loop like picture study, composer study and just start small. Start with Bible reading every day and your Bible verse and maybe the hymn that you're learning for that month. Just do that and then when you're ready for more, you can add in maybe an artist that you want to study and just do that slowly. You don't have to do it every day. You can do one picture study lesson a week. Slowly add it in. Make sure that you're keeping regular routines and make your housework, your chores, your cleanup a part of your school day because it has to happen sometime. You can't just ignore all that and think that you're gonna be able to get much done because the house is gonna be a mess. So little habits of morning time, doing your regular chores and I think slowly just adding a little bit more in and you'll know when your child is ready for it. When they're sitting around, they don't have as much to do. They're looking for the next thing. Then it's time to add in just a little bit more and just keep adding until it feels like a lot or enough and stop. So just small changes. I have the simple morning time notebook that we use in our family on the blog, ourlifehomeschooling.com. If you'd like to use that this year, you can do the same things that we're studying and you can just do part of it. You don't have to do all of it and then slowly add things in. The last question is my girls are both going into eighth grade and are not college bound. They absolutely hate any math curriculum so we pretty much make our own worksheets slash lessons that fit the standards of whatever grade level they're in. For their high school years, I am planning on using a, it's called a cartoon's guide to, I guess they have like a cartoon's guide to algebra, a cartoon's guide to geometry. It's not a curriculum, more like a supplement. We will also be using the good and the beautiful for English science and history. Social studies will be unschooling style. Any advice for me? Do you think that's a legit plan? The first thing I would say is to make sure you are looking at the requirements for your state and you can find this on HSLDA. They go state by state, they list everything that's required. So you first wanna make sure that you're covering all of that. And then next, I would say my question in the high school years, and I understand where you're coming from when you ask is this a legit plan because we as homeschool moms tend to overdo it a lot of the time. But I would ask the question more, what do I want to pass on to my daughter before she is ready to leave the nest? This is the last couple of months or years that you have with her, what do you want her to know? And I know for us, we want them to have financial literacy, we want them to know how to do some basic skills, just life skills are important for us as well as the academics. But instead of thinking, is this enough? I would ask the question, what do I want to pass down to my child? These are the last couple months that I have or years that I have with her. And looking at some of the suggestions you have that looks really good for the good and the beautiful language arts. The other ones, I actually looked up a cartoon's guide to algebra and geometry, and I like the way it's presented. It's presented in a way that's very palatable for kids. But as you mentioned, it is a supplemental material. Now I know in PA, this would not be considered a full credit, I would have to add to this to make it a full credit. There are different requirements for a credit in Pennsylvania, but one of them is 2 3rds of a textbook. So this would not cover a credit for that, but you need to look at your state and what's required. And then with unschooling style for history and social studies, I would say the same thing. Whatever materials you're using, and we like to use a lot of primary resources, original documents, I want our kids reading history from the original sources, the actual Declaration of Independence, reading the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, reading the letters of statesmen and the original speeches that people gave. Those are what I want them to read. I don't want them to read what someone is writing about history as much as I want them to be reading the history itself in those primary sources. So in our state, you can put some of those things together to make a full credit, either by logging hours or by doing 2 3rds of a textbook. There's some other options in there as well. So you really just need to look at your state and what is required. And again, I like to think in the high school years, how do I wanna spend the remaining time that I have one-on-one with my child in my home? And use that as your guide. Well, thank you for joining me for today's episode. I hope this has encouraged you. Would you take a moment to leave a review and that would help so much. I also wanna let you know that Beyond School, the Home Education Breakthrough is available on my website. This is the course where I take you step-by-step through what I have learned in over 16 years of homeschooling our 10 kids. It's exactly what I would tell you if I brought you here to my house and I just took you step-by-step, showed you our day from beginning to end. I even show you all the way through into our evening routine. It takes you through a whole day. It takes you through just some of the lessons I've learned over the years in all the different stages of homeschooling. I'll leave the link for that below if you're interested. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time on the Our Life Homeschooling Podcast.