A personal view on the effects of arguing in front of your children.

Through 31 years of marriage, I have learned a lot. How to tell when my husband isn’t in the best of moods, when he is mad and when he is feeling great. But during those not so great times when we are both at odds with life and it’s occasional drops in happiness, we have come to blows. This was early on when our eldest children were still toddling about the house. It was during these times that stress levels were high, borrowing from Peter to pay Paul and even resorting to the occasional pawning of our treasured items to put food on the table.

All couples will experience some sort of stress in their lives when it seems to take all they have to refrain from twisting their spouses head off. It was these times through the first few years that my husband and I learned that although to us the troubles were too much to NOT speak of, our children didn’t need to hear it.

Children take in everything they hear and take it to heart, and I mean EVERYTHING. They don’t have the capacity to sift through all the shouting they hear to get to the bottom of the problem, so they decipher the shouting as nothing but “Mommy and Daddy hate each other”. This inevitably can change the most robust of children into silent quivering shells of who they once used to be.

After viewing our children’s reactions to our quibbling about finances and such, we decided to take a different approach, a less brash one that would save our children from years of therapy in the future.

Thankfully enough, our next and remaining arguments and tiffs were done in writing. We bought a few cheap pads of paper where we would confine our thoughts to. Needless to say it made for a much quieter home and less nervous children.

I would suggest to anyone who has children of any age, or is thinking of having children to use this as a way of getting over life’s rough spots. Just make sure that when you are venting on paper that you destroy the evidence. Some children may notice the silence and go looking for proof of what is going on.