Mum shares the parenting hack that always stops her daughters from fighting

If you have sisters and/or brothers, you'll know that fighting is inevitable more often than not, and this also applies when you have children of your own.

Although siblings would do anything for each other when the chips are down, bickering is a regular occurrence when growing up together, as many of us can identify with. To help any parents struggling with children fighting, one mum has shared how she showed her daughters that it has negative consequences. Melissa Roy, a ballet dancer, writer and mother of four, blogs at Beyond Mommying and shared the below Facebook post. Although it might be a few months old, the message behind it is important and we figured mums reading might appreciate. She explained how she used a simple task to teach her daughters an important lesson.

"I handed my daughters each a brand-new piece of paper straight out of the package and told them to write down how they want other people to treat them".

Melissa helped her daughters and when they were finished, she told them to swap pages so they could read each other's words.

"They traded papers and read their sister's feelings aloud and I asked "do you understand how your sister wants to be treated?"

She asked if they understood how each other wanted to be treated and when she said yes, she told them to rip each other's sheets up. Of course, they were shocked that their mother would ask them to ruin their sibling's work but then Melissa explained the lesson behind her actions.

"When you do mean, hateful or hurtful things to other people, it's the same as taking their feelings and crumpling them up".

The little girls said the best way forward is to say sorry and in this scenario, smooth the paper out and so, they tried to do so. However, they quickly realised that this is easier said than done and Melissa used this as a way to teach them that it's equally hard to repair the hurt when you upset someone.

"Real feelings are the same. No matter how hard you try to smooth over hurt, the scars of the pain will remain."

This is a way of teaching your children the power that their words can have on people and it's one hack we'll be putting into practice, thanks to Melissa.