Should me and my partner fight in front of our children?
Is that good or not?
I want them to know that we can get through a fight,
but I often end up worrying that they are upset when we
as parents fight, should we not fight in front of our kids?
Our span is from five to 15,
and ugly things are sometimes said, are we causing trauma?
The answer to the question is that last question,
are we causing trauma?
If ugly things are said, hurtful things,
criticism, contempt, those things are hurtful
because we're saying negative things about the other parent.
So I would strongly discourage that. Now, if I was
to look at defining fight arguments,
disagreements that are solved
are very helpful for children to see.
But when we start getting into personal attacks, criticism,
putdowns, that type of yelling,
it can actually shut the child down
because what they're observing, most of what we fight about,
it's actually through our body language
and our tone of voice.
So words are about seven, maybe a little bit more percent
of our communication.
The next part that has a significant is actually our
nonverbal and our tone of voice.
Tone of voice about 37,
and our nonverbal body language is about 55%.
So the critical part to understand here is you might be
fighting, but your child's picking up on body language,
how you're treating each other, tone of voice.
And so helping you guys communicate in an effective way
of love through your differences is
gonna be much more effective.
So you and your spouse, my best suggestion to you guys is
to pause and look at your fight patterns.
If you can't change them, get professional marital help
so you can communicate more effectively.
Because I, the fact
that you're asking this question is a beautiful thing.
Absolutely beautiful. Now take some steps to shift
that behavior because really children need to see solutions
to problems.
Yeah, we can have disagreements.
How you argue, how you fight, how you come up
with solutions is really critical.
And so I would do my best to eliminate the ugly parts
and do our best to communicate things in a concerned,
caring, listening, even if you disagree.
So what you're saying is, help me understand
that can be effective 'cause you're teaching your child how
to effectively communicate,
but once it crosses over into interpersonal attacks
or body language that shows anger,
then I think you can be doing more harm
and your children are gonna pick up that
and they're gonna not like it too much.
