A British study looked into family conflicts and after questioning 2000 parents with children between the ages of 2 and 12, they noticed that people spend lots of time getting into tangles with their parents or brothers and sisters.
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Surprising figures
Life at home isn’t always sunshine and daisies, quite the opposite in fact. British researchers have worked out that a family loses about an hour a day quarrelling about ridiculous and trivial matters. To be more precise, parents apparently have on average 2184 arguments with their children a year, which equates to 182 a month, 42 a week and 6 a day!
These figures are rather precise, but researchers weren’t going to stop there. They then tried to calculate exactly how much time we spend bickering with our families and the result is conclusive. Apparently, we lose 49 minutes a day arguing with our brothers, sisters or parents with each catfight lasting no longer than eight minutes.
But what are we fighting about? In first place is the phrase: ‘You’re not leaving the table unless you’ve finished your dinner!’ (we’ve all heard it, especially when there’s rather unappetising vegetables on the menu).
Squabbles also break out when children refuse to clean their rooms, when brothers and sisters start bickering or when people are caught snacking between meals. It’s also worth mentioning that lots of the reasons behind these arguments are meal-related.
Now that you know how much time you spend arguing, why not take those 49 minutes to tell your family how much you love them (instead of arguing because someone took the last kit kat).
