my mother in law reminded me of this one

I try to teach the kids the difference between tattling, needing conflict resolution, and safety reporting, but they haven't quite gotten the hang of it yet.

tattling- telling me something that I don't need to know or that you have not tried to work out on your own. For example: "MOOOM, Elijah is eating cereal with a fork" Do I really need to know that? No, I don't. I don't care.

Conflict resolution- you have tried to come to an agreement or compromise, but one or all parties is not willing to budge. For example: It's movie time and Genna wants to watch Eloise and Elijah wants to watch Monsters Inc. They have tried to convince the other to agree to their movie, tried to remember who picked the last movie, and tried to find a different movie they both like. They can't come up with a solution, so they ask mom. If the process of coming to a compromise escalates to an argument, the person not involved automatically get to choose by default. (that's the prize for not getting into silly fights) If they did their best to work it out though, mom can usually figure out an arrangement that makes all happy.

Safety reporting- when someone is doing something that could hurt themselves, someone else, or cause damage to the house. For example: If the kids are playing in the other room and Isaac gets a wild hair up his rear and starts trying to bite Bella, that is the time to come get mom and let her deal with the little chomper.

Now, here are a couple examples of how the kids don't get it:

1. I don't know exactly what was going on but Genna comes to me and in a rather distressed voice says "Mom I know we're not supposed to tattle, but..... Bella is trying to kill me!"

2. Genna and Elijah get in a little tiff, Elijah decides he's going to tattle, so Genna runs ahead of him and comes to me and says "Elijah's going to tattle on me but I told him we're not supposed to tattle and that you don't like it when we tattle so I think you should take away his privileges for tattling"

3. Anyone that starts out with the words "I know I'm not supposed to tattle and I'm not tattling but..........."