Parental conflict can negatively impact children in many ways and through multiple channels of influence. This study looks very globally to find all of the ways conflict can impact children, and all of the ways they are impacted, and provides excellent flow charts to help drive home the largess of the challenges families face, and points where professionals can provide support for families.
Annual Research Review: Interparental conflict and youth psychopathology: an evidence review and practice focused update, Gordon T. Harold and Ruth Sellers, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 59:4, pp 374-402 (2018). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jcpp.12893
The study shows how impacts on children are not just psychological, but affect how children process emotions, behavior they engage in, how they think, how their internal body systems work (like heart rate and sensitivity to alarm), how they function in social settings and in academics, and how children (and later as adults) relate to other people. Parental conflict can lead to specific psychological disorders.
The ways that conflict impacts children are also extremely complex. The study thoroughly references research showing how the relationship environment, genes, and interplay of genes and the environment (GxE) can adversely impact children. Parental conflict can affect children’s genes in several different ways, either by triggering dormant genes, or changing the way some genes express themselves (the interaction of genes and environment, GxE). Parental conflict can negatively impact parenting style. By physically stressing children, parental conflict can make children become physically more sensitive to conflict.
The many ways and impacts lead to a spectrum of responses in children ranging over a continuum from “silence to violence”. (From the perspective of ICCI and the Dynamic Maturational Model of Attachment and Adaptation (DMM), we know these ways to lie on a continuum and being primarily cognitive or affective oriented.)
The article provides two detailed (and complex) flow charts. The first shows the many sources of ways that children can be impacted, and how the sources can combine and amplify a child’s adverse experiences. For example, while parental conflict can directly children, it can also negatively impact parenting style compounding the child’s negative experience of their parent. Parental conflict can impact the child’s internal functioning (including vagal tone), which can in turn influence the child’s cognitive and emotional functioning, which can then lead to behavioral and thinking problems, which can then lead to child psychopathology and disorders.
Another flow chart includes other factors that can negatively influence parenting such as substance abuse, and how that can lead to a cascade of problems for children. For example, when parental conflict is combined with a depressed parent and domestic violence from a current partner, it can lead to a child experiencing emotional, cognitive, behavioral and social dysregulation, which in turn can lead to problem functioning in those realms, and in academics, mental and physical health, and later to employment problems.
This article takes a holistic view, combining many of the known risks that can lead to problems for children, and combines them coherently into a dramatic overview. The flow charts help expand our thinking about how large the challenges are for raising healthy children, and also all the ways that families and professionals can provide help.
The study then identifies several different research-supported programs that can help improve parental communication, reduce hostility, increase problem solving and relationship skills, which all in turn support improved outcomes for children.
Because the study covers so much ground, it is dense and can be a slow read, but it is a high quality study and worth time.