Do You Fight With Your Kids?

It's good for them.

Cited by Grim:

Dr. Tabitha Holmes of SUNY–New Paltz conducted extensive interviews asking mothers and adolescents, separately, to describe their arguments and how they felt about them. And there was a big difference.

Forty-six percent of the mothers rated their arguments as being destructive to their relationships with their teens. Being challenged was stressful, chaotic, and (in their perception) disrespectful. The more frequently they fought, and the more intense the fights were, the more the mother rated the fighting as harmful. But only 23 percent of the adolescents felt that their arguments were destructive. Far more believed that fighting strengthened their relationship with their mothers.

Grim reconciles the difference:

A society that desires agreement and concession is a dishonest society, a civilization of liars. More, it is a society of people who don't respect each other:

Certain types of fighting, despite the acrimony, were ultimately signs of respect—not of disrespect

One example: conservatives who refuse to compromise principles for the sake of "unity"??