kids don’t fear fights

Last month I visited my sister in Bangalore.

Her son Vinay is eight. That evening he was sitting at the dinner table with his headphones on, head down, and eating without looking up.

My sister and her husband were in the next room, arguing loudly about something. I couldn't make out the words, but the tone was clear.

Vinay didn't flinch. He just kept eating with his headphones on, like he'd practiced this routine many times before.

After dinner I asked my sister about it.

"He does this every time we start arguing. Just puts on headphones and goes somewhere inside himself."

I kept thinking about Vinay on my drive home.

When I got back, I spent the next few days reading everything I could find on what happens to kids who grow up around parental conflict. 

In 1991, psychologist E. Mark Cummings and his team at Notre Dame exposed children to different versions of adult conflict.

One group watched adults argue and then go cold i.e, silence without any resolution.

Another group watched adults argue with the same intensity, but then come back and work it out by apologising and talking it through.

Children who saw unresolved conflict showed heightened distress, anxiety, and behavioural problems.

The ones who saw the argument AND the resolution developed better emotional regulation than the other group.

Kids who watched their parents fight and make up did better than kids whose parents kept everything smooth on the surface.

Cummings spent the next two decades building on this through what he and Patrick Davies called Emotional Security Theory. 

Their central idea: a child's nervous system is constantly reading the household for one signal above everything else.

“Are my parents okay with each other?”

When that signal keeps coming back unclear, the child's brain shifts from exploration mode to monitoring mode.

Instead of learning, playing, taking risks, they start tracking adults subtly by reading moods, observing faces and listening through the walls.

Cummings put it simply: "Children are like emotional Geiger counters."

Vinay's headphones are a coping strategy for a signal his brain can't stop scanning for.

India's divorce rate is roughly 1% and we treat this as proof of strong families

Cummings' research reads it differently.

A home where parents stay together and never resolve anything may be doing more long-term damage to a child than a home where conflict happens openly and gets repaired.

In most Indian homes, there's nowhere for conflict to hide.

Joint family or 2BHK, the walls are thin enough to hear everything. The cultural pressure does the rest. "Log kya kahenge." "Shaadi toh nibhani padti hai."

Couples stay, tension doesn't get addressed, and children grow up assuming this is just what home feels like.

Most couples fight.

What children in many Indian homes never get to see is what comes after. The repair, if it happens, happens behind closed doors. What the child is left with is the argument and then days of cold silence.

For a child's brain, that silence feels like a threat with no ending.

Reading Cummings' work, I started thinking about my own parents. They weren't dramatic fighters, but they had the cold version.

Disagreements followed by two or three days where conversation was purely functional, like "Pass the salt." or "Your school called."

They weren't screaming, nobody was slamming doors. I always thought that was fine.

But watching Vinay with his headphones, I realised I do a version of the same thing.

When a conversation with someone close to me gets tense, my first instinct is to pull back.

I learned that from watching two people who loved each other handle disagreements by going silent until the tension faded.

I never saw the repair. So I never learned how to do one.

She said they try to keep arguments away from Vinay by closing the door or keeping their voices down.

Cummings' longitudinal research across 235 families found the opposite is true.

The child doesn't need to understand the content of the fight but they need to see that the relationship survived it.

The nature of conflict did not change. But for the first time, Vinay saw two people come back from it.

What's one thing you wish your parents had done differently after a disagreement. Hit reply and tell me.

I read every email.

Until next week,
Ritesh

P.S. If you grew up in a home where the silence after the fight was worse than the fight itself, you're not alone. Most of us did. That pattern can change though. It just takes one person deciding to show the repair instead of hiding it.