Not in Front of the Kids.

• Position: EMOTIONAL SUPPRESSION

"Not in front of the kids" is an age-old plea for parents to avoid showing conflict and strong negative emotions around their children, but a trio of researchers disagrees, indicating that it is better to express negative emotions in a healthy way than to tamp them down.

Sara Waters, assistant professor in the Department of Human Development at Washington State University and coauthors from the University of California, Berkley, and UCal, San Francisco, write about their findings in the journal Emotion.

"The act of trying to suppress stress makes parents less positive. They offer less guidance, but it wasn't just the parents--kids become less responsive and positive to their parents. It's almost like the parents are transmitting those emotions," says Waters.

It also turns out that emotional suppression makes kids more sensitive to their mothers. The children show less change in their responses when a father is suppressing his emotions. For now, there is not enough data on fathers and their children in emotion studies to say why that is.

"We just don't have much research on dads because its really hard to get dads to participate in research projects," Waters relates. "It took a lot of work to get enough dads in this study."

In previous research, it has been found that, in general, men are...