One of the questions we get most often is some version of: How do you get your kids to actually get along?

The honest answer is: imperfectly, and with a lot of intentionality.

Eight kids means eight different personalities, eight different ages, eight different sets of needs and frustrations and opinions about who took whose charger. Sibling conflict is not something we've eliminated. It's something we've learned to navigate — and more importantly, something we've tried to build against.

The Goal Isn't No Conflict

Let's start there. If your goal is a house where siblings never fight, you're going to fail — and you're going to feel like a failure constantly.

The goal isn't no conflict. The goal is a family culture where the default orientation toward each other is warmth. Where the kids, even when they're annoyed with each other, still fundamentally see each other as allies rather than enemies.

That doesn't happen by accident. It's built, slowly, through hundreds of small decisions.

What We've Actually Done

We talk about the family as a team. Not in a cheesy way — in a real, practical way. When one kid succeeds, we celebrate as a family. When one kid struggles, we ask the others how they can help. We use the language of "us" and "we" constantly. The family is a unit, not just a collection of individuals who happen to share a house.

We don't allow contempt. Disagreement is fine. Frustration is fine. But eye-rolling, name-calling, dismissiveness, and mockery — those we shut down hard. Contempt is the thing that actually destroys relationships, and we don't let it take root between siblings any more than we'd let it take root in our marriage.

We create shared experiences. Game nights. Family movie nights. Road trips where everyone is stuck together for six hours and has to figure it out. Shared experiences build shared history, and shared history builds bonds that outlast the petty stuff.

We make the older kids invest in the younger ones. Our older kids have real roles in the younger kids' lives — not as parents, but as mentors and friends. We've watched those relationships become some of the most meaningful ones in the family. The 25-year-old who takes the 10-year-old to a game. The 17-year-old who teaches the 8-year-old to cook. Those moments matter.

The Long Game

Here's what we keep coming back to: your kids are going to be siblings for the rest of their lives. Long after they've left your house, long after you're gone, they'll still have each other.

The question isn't whether they'll get along perfectly right now. The question is whether you're building the kind of relationship between them that will hold when life gets hard — when they lose a parent, when they face a crisis, when they need someone who knew them when they were young.

That's worth being intentional about.

— Jareth & Deb