I Don't Agree. Michael Brown
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my three kids when they were much younger. My daughter Millie had raised the urgent query: “Is Noddy a boy or a girl?” This rapidly overheated when her eldest brother, Jake, observed that Noddy was probably hermaphrodite. When frozen ice pops were cast to the ground and stomped on, we were admonished by a stern shop assistant. Our family might still have been welcome in the nation’s favourite grocer if I’d known all I needed to do was pull the assistant up on her ignorance of what constitutes good parenting. I could have pointed out I was dealing with this outrage by passively non-intervening.
As it is, we now do our food shopping online.
The accepted wisdom is to back off and let children sort things out themselves, don’t be in a rush to fix your child’s problems for them, let them learn through their own mistakes. What if, as Kramer argues, that’s completely wrong? She argues for hands-on intervention if you don’t want to suffer the long-term consequences of inaction. Here’s how to get properly stuck in to all that belligerent behaviour. There are some interesting lessons here for all of us – whether we’re children or parents or CEOs.
1 Pre-emptive strikesThe most effective strategies are pre-emptive strikes aimed at fostering positive sibling relationships. Never mind passive non-intervention or the authoritarian ‘because-I-say-so’ approach! Tie both these imposters into a large sack and beat them to death with an olive branch. You need collaborative problem solving. This demands that you work with your kids to identify the root of the conflict and a possible solution which you can then help them implement.This means waiting until the heat of battle has subsided and getting all parties round a table. This very thing was done in a 2006 study called ‘How Siblings Resolve Their Conflicts’ by Hildy and Michael Ross – both distinguished professors emeritus at Waterloo University – and Professors Nancy Stein and the late Tom Trabasso of Chicago University. Pairs of siblings were asked to revisit an unresolved dispute and attempt to solve it through discussion. As a result, 42% of discussions ended in a compromise – a huge improvement on the swathes of research I’ve referenced here, which dealt with observed naturalistic conflict as it arose.
2 Walking the walkModelling positive behaviours also helps. If you dream of sibling harmony then you need to demonstrate what harmonious relations look like with your partner and others close to you. Trying to minimise your brood’s exposure to arguments by keeping it out of the room, for instance. Getting this wrong can lead to distinctly biblical consequences according to some academics: “When parents lack a stable value system by which to settle sibling disputes, or when their principles are capricious, bizarre, or arbitrary, the sibling relationship can become chaotic or even murderous.” So said Stephen P. Bank and Michael D. Kahn, in The Sibling Bond (1997). You’ve been warned!
3 Reward and praise
Finding an appropriate way to reward your offspring for being co-operative, respectful and friendly in their sibling interactions is a further winning strategy. Well done for sharing, Tarquin, let’s all get a Cornetto – that sort of thing.
Forensic psychologist Gina Stepp (in an article about sibling conflict for vision.org) says that reward-and-praise strategies require parents to review their behaviour: instead of brushing off bullying, aggressive altercations or heated verbal exchanges as a harmless preoccupation of growing up, parents should make it clear they expect their kids to treat each other with warmth and affection. Taking the time to celebrate such behaviour when it occurs helps children to understand what is expected of them in future. Just make sure you do it consistently and frequently.
Why we fail to use these strategies
Alarmingly, while these strategies are the most effective and seem so obvious, they are also the least used. Kramer said parents don’t talk much about managing conflict; it’s emotionally draining, which creates a tendency to favour the authoritarian approach, or doing nothing.
Let’s not kick ourselves, though – or our parents. In the 10,000 hours or more they spent squabbling over who got the last rhubarb and custard Chupa Chups when they were young, they probably never got an intervention from their folks either. Who never got one from theirs. It’s cyclical. It might well be that adults – in their general failure to help kids with maintaining a positive emotional climate, perspective-taking and other things that build positive relationships – are actually flagging that they need help with these things too.
Never mind the kids, what about the grown-ups?
It’s all very well discussing how better management of early-years conflict might improve the future lives of our kids, but what about adults in the here and now? It’s not as if any of us can travel back through time to re-run all those myriad conflicts or reverse 10,000 well-rehearsed combat hours. But don’t worry. It’s not too late to change. There are three easy fixes we can make to ensure harmony becomes a frequent visitor to the shores of our adult endeavours:
Take perspective. Take a vow. Take a clear position.
Three ways to achieve immediate harmony
The lifeblood of the business I run is selling campaign ideas to advertisers. We are in the creative industries, a space where there is much conflict – indeed, many creative people would contend that to create exceptional work, conflict is vital. This makes managing creatives an interesting behavioural study in perspective taking.
On the one hand, you have a person who is sensitively attuned to the finest vibrations of not only their deepest feelings but those of the rest of humanity – if it were otherwise, how could they meaningfully connect with an audience? On the other hand, you have a person who may be willing to shed blood at any perceived slight to their creative output or ego. I have witnessed many assertive defences of creative territory in order to ensure that a campaign idea is the one that makes it through to the pitch.
To understand the true perspective of two people with differing creative approaches to the same client brief, when both are very vocal about the advantage of their idea versus the inadequacies of the other, I often resort to an exercise I ripped off from Carl Ransom Rogers.
Rogers gave the world the theory of self-actualisation and is credited as the founder of the humanistic approach to psychology. Among many other things, he said, “As no one else can know how we perceive, we are the best experts on ourselves.” I read this as a comment on how hard it is to grasp a perspective beyond your own. Making it salient to this exercise.
Remember, we have two creatives with a beef over the brief. To ascertain if either is acting from naked self-interest, or in fact has a legitimate case for the superiority of their idea, I ask both to outline, without interruption, the other’s creative concept: the rival scheme they didn’t create.
I then ask the original creator to confirm whether or not the other has grasped their idea. We then run the exercise in reverse. If either fail in the task, then they have clearly not been listening. That means they haven’t taken a wide perspective and seen things from the other’s point of view.
In this exercise, the failure of both sides happens a lot!
It helps, of course, if the mediator (me in this case) fully understands both sides’ positions. This guards against anyone subverting the process (they could cheat by saying the other has not understood their vision, when in fact it has been clearly grasped – it happens!).
The results of a two-part study by Jacquie D. Vorauer and Stephanie-Danielle Claude, called ‘Perceived Versus Actual Transparency of Goals in Negotiation’ (1998), showed that negotiators overestimated the transparency of their own objectives. Not only that, it was found that neutral observers to a negotiation, who had been informed about the participant negotiator’s goals in advance, also overestimated the extent to which those goals would be transparent to an uninformed observer. Indeed, uninformed observers were actually more likely to find it harder to distinguish the negotiator’s goals during the negotiation. This same document also mentions other bodies of research (Brandstätter et al.) which show that negotiators typically attribute any deadlock to the other person and give more credit to themselves for