https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=JDAs_BeXKuw
My clients used to wonder, for example, if they should ever fight in front of their children. And my response to that always was, it’s not whether or not you fight, it’s whether or not you reconcile. And so what you wanna do is model for your children the fact that there’s gonna be conflict about very important and difficult issues, some of those interpersonal, but some of them just practical, that that conflict is actually going to produce a fair bit of emotion, some of which might be negative and even rather intense, but that those things can be negotiated through and the relationship can come back together. We know, for example, even by studying our close primate relatives, chimpanzees, that the males, for example, are extremely fractious in their interpersonal interactions, but the sophisticated ones are also extremely good at reconciling and peacemaking. And so, well, the point of all this is that your children are perfectly capable of adapting to a wide range of emotional events, positive and negative. And what you want to help them understand is that the relationship you have with them and with each other, if you’re married, is of the sort that’s going to be able to withstand the full range of emotional expression without breaking apart. And so you don’t have to worry about them being fragile and you don’t have to worry in some sense, even about making mistakes with them, as long as you’re doing that in the same way you would do that with someone with whom you really want to maintain a long-term relationship. It’s a very rare married couple who don’t fight, don’t ever fight and don’t ever, and one of the things that I think is important, as you say, that children may see you fight, and of course by that I don’t mean, you know, hugely aggressive, throwing things or beating a partner up, but the normal kind of arguments and fights that a couple would get into. If the children observe that, then I think you’re right that it’s important that they also see the making up. But they also learn that you’re not perfect, that conflict exists and that people resolve it and that it doesn’t destroy you. So I think that is really important. The other thing is about, you know, anger and conflict and argument is, as you say, just a normal part of life. So if you try, and this is what I see, the pressure on parents and particularly mothers to be nice all the time, to be kind and nice and never do anything in front of the children and you create a kind of false sort of family. And some of the families I know that I think have the most healthy relationships are the ones that shout at each other quite a lot. You know, they’re quite volatile in the way that they do so, but they’re very honest and they make up and they’re very, very close and loving families. So you can’t, you know, and then there are other families that try, or the parents try desperately hard to always present a loving and kind and nice front and everything’s false and everything’s under the sun. And that, I think, is very, very confusing and anxiety-provoking in children when you can feel the undercurrents as children can, but nobody’s saying anything out loud. Right, well, that’s part of that extended Oedipal complex in some sense is that the issue is, I mean, it’s perfectly reasonable for people to work towards having peace in their household. But peace is actually extremely difficult to establish and maintain because peace means that both of you agree and also peace means that there’s nothing unbelievably complicated facing you at the moment about which you have no idea, and you have no idea how to approach it. You know, if you have a sick child, for example, then, and you’re trying to sort through how to discipline a child like that, let’s say, or what medical pathway to walk down, there’s no way you can avoid having conflict if you’re gonna think about it because it’s a very serious issue and you have to think about it seriously and that means you have to discuss it and if you have a different viewpoint, that discussion can get quite heated. But there’s no difference between that and thinking that heated discussion. And unless you sort through, say, the complexities on the disciplinary and the medical treatment front, you actually don’t have peace, right? You just have a problem. Now, what happens in the families that insist upon presenting this, you might say, gingerbread house world of false peace to their children is that they’re pretending constantly that every problem is solved and peace actually reigns, but they’re telling the children, often through nonverbal behavior, that any conflict whatsoever is so disruptive and so intolerable that we have to pretend all the time that no conflict whatsoever exists. And so all that does is turn children into creatures that are terrified of their own negative emotions. So they feel that if peace is so necessary and psyche is so fragile that no emotion whatsoever is allowed on the negative side, then any problem must be of terrifying proportions and only something to avoid. And that’s definitely a catastrophe for children, especially because they can, especially when they’re little, they can be quite volatile, right? I mean, if they’re tired or hungry or hot or cold and they get volatile, they get upset. And then if they’re feeling that they’re breaking the eggshells underneath the carpet or rattling the skeletons in the closet, that’s just not good for them at all. Yeah, it teaches children to be afraid of conflict and disagreement and argument, and those are parts of a healthy relationship. You disagree and you… I think that when it comes to disciplining the children, that’s an issue that is the adult’s job and it shouldn’t be done in front of the children. I mean, it helps if parents share the same values, but often there is a difference between, I mean, discipline and attitudes to discipline. This is so, so common that one parent is more authoritarian and the other parent is more liberal and wants to let the children get away with things more, and the other one wants really tough discipline. And that’s so, so common to a greater or lesser extent. So those sorts of issues really need to be talked about and sorted out by the parents. It’s not the child’s job to join in with methods of his or her own discipline. That is the parent’s job. It’s the adult’s job and a child isn’t, and then the parent should be able to reach some agreement or compromise and then proceed, but that shouldn’t be part of the child’s job. It’s not the child’s job to… Well, you talked about two camps of discipline, Camp A and Camp B. Camp A associated with order, let’s say, and integration into the social world, and Camp B associated more, let’s say, with chaos. And individuation, and that’s kind of a conservative liberal split there too. And I suppose that does reflect the fact that children have two problems to solve as they mature, broadly speaking. One is, well, how do I get along with my parents and my siblings and my friends and my teachers, the whole social world? How do I fit in? So that’s problem number one. So that means how do I conduct myself so that people appreciate having me around and I’m a valued social member? And the second problem is, well, how do I stand in my own two feet and also become a reliable source of creative individuality and some ability to push back against the mindlessness of the group? And that is an optimization problem. It’s very complex, and there’s no simple answer to that, partly because it depends on the situation and it depends on the child. And so parents definitely have to negotiate that out. I found with my wife, I probably was… I’d probably make the first disciplinary move in like 75% of the cases, maybe 60% of the cases in our marriage. I don’t think that’s that uncommon because men are more likely to intervene by and large than women are, because they’re less agreeable. But I also found, most of the time, although my wife and I were pretty much on the same page with our kids, if I just shut the hell up for 15 seconds when the kids were misbehaving, she would respond. And it was so interesting because her threshold for tolerating misbehavior was not very much different than mine. It was literally, say on average, 15 seconds. But because it was reliably, she was reliably somewhat more patient, that did mean that in some circumstances, the bulk of the initial disciplinary moves fell to me.