My Trick to Stop the Kids’ Fighting

A couple of years ago I accidentally stumbled upon the perfect cure for my kids’ fighting. I can’t guarantee that it will work for your kids too, but it works SO well for mine that I figure it’s worth a shot with any kids. (=

Whenever the kids are fighting I simply pull out my “mean mom voice” (you know the one I’m talking about — we all have one, right?) and I tell them that they are NOT ALLOWED to talk to each other anymore. Over the next few minutes I just go about my business and when I hear them attempt to talk to each other and continue their argument I remind them that they are NOT ALLOWED to talk to each other.  It usually takes no more than 5-10 minutes before I hear extreme laughter from the other room because their attempts at mime-ing (Is mime-ing even a word? I’m going to use it – you know what it means, right? Pretending they are mimes and acting stuff out…)  to each other have cracked them up.  I throw in a few more “mean mom” reminders during this phase too – which, of course, ramps up their crazy mime-antics – and soon they come to me in much better moods asking if they can PLEASE talk to each other again and they promise they’ll be nice. It works like a charm! (=

Like I said, I can’t guarantee that it will work for all kids, but it works so well for mine that I thought I’d share the tactic in case you wanted to give it a try. (=

What do you do to end your kiddos’ bickering?