It’s no secret that having kids can be a real handful. When you have more children than you do fingers however, that can turn a handful into an armful. Danielle and Adam have six children, one older daughter, and then a set of quintuplets. That’s five for the price of one! On the TLC program called Outdaughtered, the battle hardened couple cover various topics or “lessons” on parenting.
They must be the experts with an ensemble of characters like theirs!
The first topic covered in this video is: Sharing.
Danielle introduces the topic, and let’s just say it’s good that they still have a sense of humor about it!
“So sharing, in our house of six kids, we don’t struggle with this at all!”- Danielle
I’m going to go out on a limb here and presume that that was sarcasm. Danielle goes on to explain that they simply don’t have five of every single thing they own, and so inevitably sharing is a major conflict between the quints especially.
As Adam explains, this is something that can’t be totally avoided. “It’s just the nature of children, whenever they see something they want to be possessive”
They have tried a new method using a timer.
Their solution isn’t always a simple solution and can be tricky in and of itself.
“It’s just something that you have to be proactive with because whenever they know that that’s the rule like I only have this for a certain amount of time then they’re all for (it), they’re willing to share-” says Adam. “-and they play so much better together knowing that they’re going to each get a turn”- adds Danielle
Danielle’s next nugget of knowledge is that you need to ensure the time periods are the same otherwise they will cotton on and manipulate the rules if given the chance.
“No matter what, make sure you’re emphasizing that time management across your sharing periods are the same because, I’m going to tell you that they’re going to catch on and say “that timer didn’t go off, you forgot to set a timer and if they get old enough like Blake, they will look at a clock and say it’s been 8 minutes, so do I get 8 minutes?”- Danielle
As we can see, there is no one-size-fits-all solution, which in their next topics seems to be a recurring theme
Next lesson: Sibling Rivalries
“With 6 girls in the house, and 5 of them the same age, we have our fair share of sibling rivalries” explains Adam. He goes on to elaborate that in that house the two biggest rivals are Riley and Olivia. And there are some pretty interesting reasons why:
“The problem is Riley wants to think of herself as the alpha and she always wants attention. But then Olivia is kind of like the performer and so like Riley just gets so angry whenever she sees Olivia, and people giving Olivia attention and she feels like she needs to one-up Olivia but then Olivia just doesn’t let up… and then it gets out of hand”
To deal with these conflicts, the parent’s method is to get the girls to apologize, tell them that they love each other and give the other a hug and a kiss.
In Adam’s words, the next subject, is a doozy: Discipline
As the parents describe, it’s one of those things where one method isn’t going to work 100% of the time for every kid and it’s constantly changing.
Danielle describes the method that worked the best for them overall; the “one two three method”.
1 means stop.
2 means warning.
3 means consequence.
In order to make sure that the rules all sink into the kid’s brains, they collect them all around the kitchen counter and go over the rules as if in a staff meeting. Now that is order among the chaos!
Watch the full video below for these top tips among the chaos of cuteness!
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