SLUG FEST: Parents should behave civilly in front of children

Rowing in front of the kids is bad for them. Most of us know that already. And while a new study last month confirmed this, it also created an extra burden of parental guilt by discovering that not rowing in front of the children is bad for them, too. Damned if you do; damned if you don’t. So how should parents behave in the event that the rest of their lives together don’t constitute an unbroken run of partnership bliss?

The new study, by the University of Rochester in New York, tells us that it is not only the obvious stuff ? lobbing frying pans, shouting and swearing ? that distresses children but also the more subtle, simmering resentment practised by families who pride themselves on never fighting in front of the children. Patrick Davies, the psychologist who conducted the research, says: “With parents who tried to contain anger, or express it as the silent treatment, we found that children pick up on that just as much as more open hostilities and they expressed anxiety, and a watchful attention, worried about what might happen next.”

But is rowing, either noisily or silently, really so bad? Parents in their thirties and forties, who may recall their own parents regularly hurling abuse at each other, might think it did them no harm. “We just used to duck and cover, as advised in those nuclear war educational films,” laughs one forty something friend who is seemingly unscathed by his parents’ blistering rows. Things have changed, however, thanks to the breakdown of families, says Linda Blair, a psychologist. “The difference is that then there were many more intact families. Now most children know other children whose parents have separated, so they catastrophise and think of the worst outcome ? their parents splitting up”.

Fortunately, that’s not to say that if we want to raise emotionally healthy children we have to quit our jobs and never row or even glare at each other. A report called Not in Front of the Children, by the marriage and partnership research organisation One Plus One, offers an analysis of hundreds of studies of the effects of parental conflict on children and acknowledges that conflict is inevitable, but that some types of conflict are less damaging than others.

Aggressive behaviour, physical and verbal abuse, conflicts where one parent withdraws from the row (leaving it unresolved) and fights over or about the child are the worst, in terms of negative emotional impact on the children. Less damaging is the type of row where parents agree to disagree, or when one parent gives in (but not grudgingly). And the least damaging kind of row is one where the parents apologise and reach a compromise.

But who rows like this, maturely, consistently, in real life? I know a couple who row in Portuguese, a language that their 11-year-old doesn’t speak, but he gets the loudness, the tone, the facial expressions. I know another couple who weren’t speaking to each other and sent their 14-year-old as a messenger of bad-will, along the lines of “Oh yeah, well, tell your father I said this . . .”

One shamed mother admits: “We had a ‘talking stone’ in our house, specifically for rows. You don’t speak unless you are holding the stone. My husband and I were having a terrible fight, and my nine-year-old daughter handed me the stone, so we could have a discussion, but I was so angry I just lobbed it at my husband. Oddly, it did break the tension. Everybody wound up laughing.”

FAMILY FUN: Laughter is healthy

Laughter is good; throwing things is not. We must row with civility and empathy or this is what might happen to our children: first, they’ll get anxious and upset, the way most people do in the presence of a row. Less obviously, but more pertinently, we do not look after the children so well when we are embroiled in a row.

Penny Mansfield, the director of One Plus One, says: “Parents who are distracted by their own conflict tend to be less good at parenting. The children don’t get enough attention.” Another way some children react, she says, is to mimic the rows they witness. “They learn that this is how you relate to people. But most potentially destructive is when the child thinks: ‘If Dad is so angry at Mum, he can be that angry at me’.” She adds that some children are more badly behaved because of parental conflict. “This is a strategy because if a child acts up, he gets attention from his parents and they are distracted from their conflict. Other children are troubled and might withdraw ? the ones that teachers describe as ‘no problem’ ? but these are the ones who might go on to develop depression.”