All families have conflicts. But blended families are set up to have more, or more difficult ones. Most blended families live in different homes, sometimes even states apart. We’re often created at least in part by divorce — a conflict in itself. But in raising my daughter along with my first husband, his wife, and now my second husband, I’ve learned there are ways to minimize conflict.

Often, we just disagree about the right approach. No one is right or wrong — we just look at things in a different way. My goal is to keep our conflicts away from my daughter as much as possible, while still letting her see that we’re all different and that that’s OK, too.

I’ve found a paradigm laid out in The Explosive Child to be helpful in dealing with conflict in many parts of my life. The book gives you strategies for dealing with difficult kids [hey, that's a different post ], and it divides negative behavior into three categories:

• Bucket A–Things that relate to health and safety. You can’t compromise there.
• Bucket B–Stuff you’d like to change, but it’s not life or death.
• Bucket C–Stuff that frankly you don’t like, but it’s not worth the argument.

I try to approach all conflict that way, and it helps — even if the other party doesn’t use the same system. It’s all too easy to draw a line in the concrete on issues that really don’t matter. Thinking about what bucket to put an issue into helps avoid that.

How do you handle conflicts in your family?

Laura Creekmore is mom to the 9yo, the 3yo and the player to be named by mid-May. She and her husband live in Nashville, TN, where she blogs about cooking and random things that strike her fancy at Fixin’ Supper. She’s a web strategist by trade and runs her own company, Creekmore Consulting.