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I have three children (ages 6, 8, and 10) and they are constanting bickering. Most of the time, it looks something like this:
Child one: (comes running in, hystercially whining and crying) “XYX just hit me!”
Child two: (comes running in, 30 seconds behind Child One, also hysterally whining and crying) “He bit me!”
Child One: I did not!
Child Two: You did too!
And then they start screaming at each other, while I’m standing there, trying to figure exactly what happened, in what order, and how to best handle the situation. But, about 80% of the time, I end up just screaming “Stop it! I’ve had ENOUGH! Both of you — up to your rooms RIGHT NOW!” (please tell me I’m not the only one)
My husband has even less patience than me. He doens’t even want to try to figure it out most of the time. So, when I came home from work one day and saw all three children playing basketball together, I thought “oh man, this is not going to end well. They cannot do anything together without fighting.” And I asked my husband how his day had gone with them.
He points to a piece of paper with writing all over and says “It’s been pretty good . . . anytime they come to tattle on each other, I’ve been making them file a written complaint instead. It’s working great!”
Not five minutes later, our oldest comes inside and starts to tattle on her little brother. My husband tells her to write it down and hand it in to him. And she immediately stops whining, runs into the other room and grabs a piece of paper and starts writing. When she’s finished, she hands it to him, he reads it and then says “now write down what happened before that to create this problem.” And again, she sits down and starts scribbling away. When she hands this one in, he says “Now write down how you could have helped to prevent this situation from occuring in the first place.”
I notice two things right away — the anger and frustration our daughter was feeling is quickly draining out of her. She’s not as angry and seems happy that we are validating her feelings and her opinions on the situation. Also, my husband is not angry at all (even though she was the one who started the whole incident and was CLEARLY in the wrong) — he’s able to calmly read her descriptions of the events and handle it without yelling and sending her to her room. And not only is he handling the initial tattling episode, he’s doing some serious parenting moves and making her think about how she can handle the situation on her own next time! Totally win-win on both accounts. And also? One of our other children is a little more laid back and lazy, so when he comes in to tell on someone for something silly and is reminded of the written complaint form, he’s more like “eh, never mind” and goes back outside to play. lol
Since I love creating forms just about as much as I hate finding all the paper gone from my printer, I decided to design a half-page form that the kids would fill out when they wanted to report an incident. I was laughing out loud while creating this and thought it might be something other parents might find useful. So follow this link to download your own copy of the complaint form.
Or if you are interested in ordering a pre-made notepad, you can purchase them below:
Full color Formal Complaint Notepads with 25 sheets per pad, sized 8.5″ x 5.5″.
Set of 2 Formal Complaint Pad (FREE shipping!) $17.99
