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As parents, part of our responsibility is to define what “normal” or acceptable behavior is for our children. Raising up children who will thrive long after they leave our house is our ultimate goal, and creating their future normal is a huge part of it. 

Every child turns into a man or woman who must decide for themselves what type of person they will become. They will have to decide to pattern their life after their parents or not. Some of these decisions are easy to make, while some patterns that parents pass down leave a much more subconscious imprint. 

One of these subconscious areas is how our children deal with conflict and conflict resolution. This is an area where parents have a significant responsibility to teach their children what it means to have healthy, effective and functional conflict resolution. 

For our house, Heather and I could not be any more different. She will tell you that she is the “hot head” of the two of us. In fact, it took her years to learn how to recognize when she was about to lose her temper and take steps to control it. 

Heather will also tell you that a hot temper is a generational thing that is pass down in her family. That doesn’t mean that she was content being a loose cannon, and worked incredibly hard to show our kids a mother who is full of peace and is a safe place when things become stressed or tense. 

I am the opposite. When something goes wrong, or conflict arises, I typically get quiet and shut down. I would rather just suck it up, pretend the issue didn’t happen and go on about my life. 

Unfortunately, conflict avoidance is a horrible way of dealing with issues. Doing this could have destroy my marriage over time and taught my children a dysfunctional way of dealing with issues. 

What Heather and I realized is that we needed to create healthy patterns of dealing with conflict so that we can create a stable and thriving home. As we have gotten better at this in our marriage, we created a normal for kids in how they will function in their future relationships. 

Even if someone had come from an abusive home, the can break the pattern of behavior and teach their children a healthy way of dealing with conflict and stress. The way this happens is by modeling the behavior that they want for their kids. Kids hear what you say, but they watch EVERYTHING and copy that behavior. 

If we want our children to be able successful one day as a spouse or parent, we have to teach them the right way to handle conflict. They have to see from us how to work through issues in a way that is healthy and healing and not destructive.