Welcome to conflict resolution. Conflict resolution is a crucial skill set! No matter how great your plan is, conflict is a fact of life. These activities and skills will set your child up to be able to skillfully navigate conflict in digital spaces, to know how to respond and when not to respond, and to know when an adult's help and guidance is needed.

After you watch the video, you will find the three discussion activities for this lesson in the PDF (ebook).

Conflict Resolution

This is an area where we know that you as an adult know more than your child.

You have more experience with conflict resolution than your child.

Now, you may have a little Ghandi in your house who’s great at conflict resolution. And maybe embraces talking things out. But kids often are afraid of conflict and don’t know what to do with it, or they get very revved up by conflict.

A lot of kids can also get into conflict as a spectator sport at this age. So if your child is arguing with a friend over text, the friend may end up sharing screenshots of the argument. Now that can be your kid, too. Your child also may screenshot the conflict or just show the phone to a friend, and we want to talk to kids about why that’s not such a good idea.

Kids really should only be sharing their texts if their friend is in danger or something like that. But if your friend is mad at you, you don’t want to amplify the fight by sharing the text with other people. The best thing to do in a conflict is to take it offline, meet in person, and work it out.

It’s really easy for feelings to get hurt over text when compared to a conversation in person, because there’s no ability to gage tone or intent. Often kids will say that they were just kidding later and it’s hard to tell if that’s really true, or now they were just kidding because they just hurt your feelings.

Crucial Reminder!

It is almost impossible to successfully resolve an argument via text. I can say that I have many times tried to resolve an argument via text and realized the impossibility of doing so, and it’s even more so for our kids.

Actions:

1. Watch the video
2. Review Conflict mini-ebook and plan to have the three discussions that are suggested.
3. In the comments, share how at least one of the discussions went.