News

19 Dec 2007

Training parents in mediation helps children do better at handling sibling battles, a 2007 study shows

Children whose parents underwent a 1.5-hour session on mediation skills resolved sibling fights more constructively and calmly, were more likely to compromise, and were better able to handle conflicts on their own, Drs Julie Smith and Hildy Ross of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada found.

While conflicts between siblings "can be frequent and quite aggressive," these fights are important opportunities for children to learn negotiation and other skills, Smith and Ross noted.

In mediation, a "neutral third party" helps negotiate a solution to a problem, with the conflicting individuals having final say over how the conflict will be resolved. There are four key steps in mediation: ground rules are set, the source of the conflict is agreed upon, mediators try to help the conflicting parties understand and feel empathy for one another, and the conflicting parties propose and agree upon a solution. Perhaps most relevant for parents, the mediator doesn't chose sides or lay blame.

To test whether this approach might help parents do a better job of handling sibling conflicts, Smith and Ross randomly assigned 48 families with children 5 to 10 years old to mediation training or a control group. Parents were then asked to keep track of and rate conflicts that occurred among their children for two weeks or until five such conflicts had occurred.

Conflicts in the group who received the training were usually resolved by compromise, the researchers found, while those in the control group tended to end with one side losing or winning or not being resolved.

Overall, parents who received mediation training said their children resolved conflicts more constructively and took a more active role in conflict resolution. When the researchers observed children in both groups trying to resolve conflicts on their own, they found the children in the mediation group were less negative in negotiating conflicts and more understanding of their siblings.

"When parents are trained to use mediation in their children's disputes," Smith and Ross conclude, "children's independent conflict management improves relative to a control group as does their understanding of conflict ambiguity and of the specific goals and emotions of their adversaries."

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