Home Schooling With Sibling Rivalry

Fair, Not Equal

• One advantage you have as a home-school parent is to individualize curriculum and teaching. This can reduce the rivalry when one child finds a subject or curriculum easy and another child finds it incomprehensible. Treating your kids differently based on their personal strengths and weaknesses is fair, not equal, and meets each child̵7;s individual needs, reducing sibling rivalry, according to Carletta Sanders, home-school mom and author of ̶0;101 Ways to Save Money on Homeschooling!̶1;

Encourage Teamwork

• Home-school kids spend lots of time together, and their bickering and competition can take up time that could be better spent on schoolwork. Kill two birds with one stone and use team-building activities as part of your home-school curriculum, suggests Pride. Utilize a unit study approach to teach all or most of your children across the curriculum. Assign one child one component of the subject, such as Egyptian hieroglyphics, another child Egyptian farming techniques and your third child pyramid building. Each child can work the topic at her own level and share what she learned during the lesson round up. Rotate topics each day, continuing until each child has worked on all topics and shared information with his siblings. The teamwork ensures everyone learns the material as a a team. Teamwork can spill over into other areas, reports Pride, so that chores, service projects and recreation activities benefit from a team effort.

Individual Time

• Spend one-on-one time with each child during the day. One child could need extra help with math and another child needs encouragement with Spanish or music. While working with one child, your other child can concentrate on material that he can comprehend and complete without assistance. Include one-on-one time for non-academics too, such as chatting with a child while making lunch together and exercising with another child or making a grocery run together later in the evening. Individual time with each parent is ideal. During one-on-one time, actively listen to your child, suggests Dr. Wilson, listening for emotional issues, brainstorming strategies for academics and conflict management and hearing what is really important to your child.

Work It Out

• If you don̵7;t jump in to resolve conflict every time the children bicker, annoy or lord it over a sibling, you can teach conflict resolution in an experiential way, according to Dr. Wilson. Reduce conflict by placing desks for individual work at a distance from each other and setting a zero-tolerance policy for physical and verbal fighting. Give them a time limit to settle conflict or you will. Make them run laps around the backyard, take on extra chores such as cleaning the bathroom or kitchen floor with an old toothbrush or restricting use of favorite electronics as consequences for baiting and annoying behaviors. If the consequences for rivalry behavior are unpleasant enough, they will learn to work it out together.