Fighting in Front of the Children

Do you fight with your spouse in front of your children?  I never saw my parents fight.  They told me later when I was an adult that they did have fights, but they had agreed never to have them in front of me and my brother.

I know they did this for our own good, but sometimes I think it might have been helpful for me to actually see people arguing and fighting and resolving conflicts as I was growing up.  That way it wouldn’t have come as such a shock to me when I encountered it later in the real world.

As it turns out, a 2009 study by University of Notre Dame psychologists, cited in this article, showed that children can actually learn something good from parents fights, as long as the fight is resolved properly. The researchers found that children were stressed if they witnessed part of a fight but never saw or heard about the resolution.