CLEVELAND — As parents, we've all had the experience with our kids where they come home from school and say that they've had friend drama on the playground or over social media.
There's a fine line of when to jump in and how to guide them to solve the conflict on their own.
In today’s Mom Squad, we ask about everyday conflict resolution with Dr. Kim Bell, a clinical psychologist with the Hanna Perkins Center for Childhood Development.
She says this is something all kids need to go through for development.
“We want to tolerate negative feelings, which is: being left out, somebody doesn't want to play with me, somebody else has a friend and I'm feeling like I'm not the most important friend anymore. Those are all developmentally natural experiences that we have to survive,” says Bell.
So, how do we help them learn how to tolerate those feelings?
“I think too often we hate to see our kids in pain and so we jump into quickly to fix it,” says Bell, “I recommend in our very busy world, if you can to have a relationship with your kids friends' parents, so that you can in an ideal situation if two kids are having a conflict you can contact that other parent and say, ‘I think our kids are having a struggle.' Not that you guys figure it out and make rules for the kids, but in a perfect world, you're getting those kids together and you're helping them to resolve it.”
You can watch the entire episode below.
To hear the entire conversation, you can watch Mom Squad on WKYC Plus on Roku and Fire TV. Or watch on the WKYC YouTube channel.
MORE MOM SQUAD:
MORE HEADLINES: