Dealing With Family Conflicts
How does your family handle the disagreements that occur in your household? Conflicts are basic to human relationships; they are inevitable and should not be avoided. However, family members should know how to negotiate and resolve these conflicts. To negotiate, parents and children both need to make a genuine attempt to understand the attitudes, feelings, and desires of one another. When disagreements are resolved successfully, family life is enhanced and relationships are strengthened.
Some families cannot seem to settle conflicts. Family members may deny that problems exist. Or they may draw a third person into the conflict, supposedly to mediate the difficulty, but who instead may take a position on one side or the other and thereby make the disagreement worse. Sometimes when they are unable to resolve their conflict, the warring parties may join together to focus attention on another family member as a way to avoid dealing with the real problem.