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Fight Fair
Don't Argue in Front of Your Kids
By Heather Johnson Durocher
The entire family benefits when parents fight fair, according to Dr. Korrel Kanoy, associate dean of Peace College in Raleigh, N.C., who specializes in the social-emotional development of children and parent/child interaction.
"There's a relationship between unproductive kinds of conflict and deterioration of parenting skills," says Dr. Kanoy, who is part of the Chapel Hill, N.C.-based Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center's research team examining marital conflict and how this affects children. For example, the team's research has found that as marital conflict increases, so does physical punishment of the children.
What's important is not "if" parents argue, but "how" they speak to each other during disagreements, Ginsberg says. Certainly, throwing things or screaming at each other isn't appropriate behavior for parents to exhibit. Couples also should remember to steer clear of personal attacks, such as "Why are you so lazy?" or "Why did I marry you?" Aside from the fact that such unkind words are destructive to a marriage, they negatively affect children. "Kids are very literal about those things," she says.
Bringing the child into the argument is never good, although it happens all too easily, says Susan Fletcher, Ph.D., a Dallas, Texas, psychologist and mother of three young children. During a fight, one parent may say to the other, "Now look what you've done; you've upset her," Fletcher says. A better response to the escalating tension, she says, would be to calmly say, "We need to slow down a bit here. We need to keep figuring out a way to resolve this in a way that can provide security for all of us."
Even a baby can pic up on stressful situations, and children will react differently to their parents' arguments depending upon their age, experts say.