Negotiation Is Not the Same as Safety

Ground Notes, Part One

During a recent conversation among friends, a woman reflected, only half-jokingly, that she had failed to teach her two teenage children not to fight.

Her children, seventeen and eighteen, were present.

The seventeen-year-old explained that because their mother had been so against them arguing, they had learned to do it behind her back.

This was what made their mother feel that she had failed.

She had not succeeded in removing conflict from their relationship. She had made it less visible to her.

She did, however, feel that she had successfully taught them to negotiate.

She knew why this had mattered to her.

When she and her older brother fought as children, he sometimes hurt her. When she went to their mother for help, her mother would say:

“Regel het zelf. Jullie moeten overeenkomen.”

Sort it out yourselves. You have to come to an agreement.

Her mother was also present during our conversation. She explained that she had not wanted to take sides or become caught between competing “he said, she said” accounts.

She appeared relatively untroubled by the recollection. She had grown up as one of eight children and remembered how the younger siblings were sometimes pushed away from the family’s one living-room sofa by their older brothers.

Perhaps these displacements were understood as ordinary sibling life: children competing, playing, quarrelling and learning to manage among themselves.

We cannot know exactly how one experience shaped another. But the conversation made me wonder how a childhood adaptation can gradually become a parenting principle.

One generation may learn to endure.

The next may become highly skilled at negotiating.

A later generation may learn to move conflict out of adult sight.

Negotiation is valuable, but it is not the same as safety. Nor is the absence of visible arguing necessarily evidence of relational peace.

A child who is frightened, hurt or physically overpowered is not entering an equal negotiation. Before children can reach an agreement, they may need an adult to protect their bodies, slow the situation down and help everyone understand what happened.

The adult does not have to decide that one child is good and the other bad.

They can say:

I will not let you hurt one another. First, we make sure everyone is safe. Then we can find out what happened.

This is not taking sides against a child.

It is taking the side of safety.

The conversation also left me wondering about the language of resilience.

Sometimes resilience means being able to experience difficulty, recognise our limits, seek support, recover and try again.

But sometimes what is praised as resilience is closer to endurance: learning to ignore discomfort, override internal boundaries and keep going because stopping or asking for help does not seem available.

When children are repeatedly left to manage conflict alone, do they learn healthy negotiation?

Or might they also learn to negotiate against themselves?

To tolerate what hurts. To stay quiet. To keep going. To solve the problem without troubling an adult. To move conflict somewhere it will not disturb the people around them.

This is not an argument for adults to supervise every disagreement or decide every outcome.

Children need space to experiment, disagree, recover and find their own solutions.

But they also need enough adult presence, interaction and playfulness to help their nervous systems slow down. Sometimes they need an adult to sit nearby, name what is happening, protect a boundary, introduce language or help them return to one another after the intensity has passed.

Playful connection matters here too.

Children do not learn regulation only when something has gone wrong. They develop it through ordinary moments of shared attention, physical play, humour, rhythm, repetition and adults who are available enough to notice when the energy is becoming too much.

A strength can be genuine and valuable without proving that the ground from which it grew gave the child everything she needed.

Perhaps the question is not whether we succeeded in stopping children from fighting.

Perhaps it is whether they learned that conflict can remain visible, that safety can be restored, and that asking for adult support does not mean they have failed to manage life for themselves.