In the literature, little attention has been paid to the specific impact of child-related versus adult-related inter-parental conflicts on children’s intrapersonal processes and adjustment. Aimed to advance knowledge on this topic, the cross-sectional study explores: 1) the predictive effects of the two forms of inter-parental conflicts on: a) children’s internalizing/externalizing behaviors and b) children’s cognitive appraisals, emotional distress, and triangulation; 2) the mediating role of children’s cognitive appraisals, emotional distress, and triangulation, in the association between adult-related vs child-related conflict and children’s adjustment. Seventy-five school-aged children and their parents completed measures of inter-parental conflict, cognitive, emotional and behavioral processes and child adjustment. The results indicated that: 1) higher levels of adult-related inter-parental conflict promoted children’s internalizing behaviors, through the mediation of perceived threat; 2) higher levels of child-related inter-parental discord promoted both children’s internalizing/externalzing behaviors, through the mediation of perceived threat and self-blame.
Although conflict is inevitable in every marriage, the frequency, intensity and content of discord vary across couples. When parents manage their divergences in positive ways, by displaying verbal and physical affection, problem solving and support, the conflict is said to be constructive (
In literature, various mechanisms have been proposed to explain the link between inter-parental discord and child adjustment. More specifically, the Cognitive-Contextual Framework (
Another conceptual model, the Emotional Security Hypothesis (
The studies above mentioned have substantially neglected to explore the possible associations among the content of the inter-parental discord and the children’s cognitive, emotional, behavioral processes and their adjustment, except for the studies of
The present cross-sectional study, based on the suggestions of both the Cognitive Contextual Model (
According to literature, we hypothesized that: (H1) both adult and child-related conflicts could be predictive of children’s internalizing and externalizing behaviors (
Participants were 75 Italian parents (mothers and fathers) and their 75 children (58% girls) ages 7–11 years (
We selected four primary public schools located in Milan and in the Province of Milan, mainly attended by families with an average socio-economic level. The schools were recruited by a standard procedure that included introductory meetings with school principals and letters to the parents, describing the goals and procedures of the study. One hundred and twelve families (convenience sampling) were approached, of whom spontaneous and unpaid consent to participate was obtained from 88 parents (73.3%). Parents signed consent forms, for themselves and their children, that described the project and its goals, the voluntary nature of participation, and the confidentiality of the data collected. Each participant could also have the possibility to give up the research at any time without any explanation and could request a personal meeting with the referent researcher before and at the end of the completion of the questionnaires.
The school-aged children were approached in school classrooms during regular class time at the convenience of participating teachers. Two research assistants, trained by the authors, during their research internship of 6 months, conducted the administration procedure. The measures were administered with a random order and research assistants gave assistance to children if they had difficulty in understanding any of the questions (i.e., reading the items and word definitions). Moreover, in case of children’s distress, research assistants could stop the procedure and relieve the children. Completion of the measures examined in the present study took approximately 20 minutes. Packets consisting of self-report measures (see the Measures Section) were delivered to parents. Measures were accompanied by a letter describing the modalities for their self-administering, in which mothers and fathers were asked to fill in the forms independently, without sharing their answers, and to return all the questionnaires by the next 2 months to the schools. For thirteen families (nine fathers and four mothers) we found missing and incomplete data and we deleted these families from the data set. We therefore obtained complete data for 75 parents and their children. Ethical approval was obtained from the Ethics Committee of the Catholic University of Milan for the project Inter-parental conflict and child adjustment, in April 2013.
Children completed the
Both parents completed the
Inter-parental conflict was assessed via self-reports by children and both of their parents. Children completed the
Both parents also completed the
This scale has demonstrated excellent reliability and validity in past research (α = .82;
The
Children’s triangulation into parental conflicts was assessed using the
To assess children’s distress from the inter-parental conflict, children completed one sub-scale of the Security in the Inter-Parental Subsystem (SIS;
Both parents completed the
Descriptive statistics were computed for all the variables.
Means and standard deviations of all variables used in the present study are presented in
Variable | Min-Max | ||
---|---|---|---|
Adult-related conflict (Mothers: DAS) | 11.12 | 1.84 | 3–14 |
Adult-related conflict (Fathers: DAS) | 11.16 | 1.83 | 6–15 |
Adult-related conflict (Children: CPIC) | 10.48 | 6.90 | 0–35 |
Child-related conflict (Mothers) | 0.91 | 0.75 | 0–3 |
Child-related conflict (Fathers) | 0.88 | 0.80 | 0–3 |
Child-related conflict (Children: CPIC-Content) | 2.04 | 1.60 | 0–11 |
Perceived threat (CPIC) | 3.78 | 3.11 | 0–11 |
Self-blame (CPIC) | 2.40 | 2.11 | 0–10 |
Triangulation (CPIC) | 4.23 | 3.16 | 0–11 |
Emotional distress (SIS) | 17.54 | 5.56 | 9–34 |
Internalizing behaviors (CBCL) | 6.55 | 4.51 | 0–23 |
Externalizing behaviors (CBCL) | 6.88 | 4.61 | 0–24 |
The
The correlation analyses showed that the variables were correlated (see
Variable | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1. Adult-related conflict | – | |||||||
2. Child-related conflict | .32** | – | ||||||
3. Perceived threat | .38** | .43** | – | |||||
4. Self-blame | .23* | .59** | .42** | – | ||||
5. Emotional distress | .43** | .35** | .62** | .29* | – | |||
6. Triangulation | .32** | .41** | .54** | .39** | .29* | – | ||
7. Internalizing behaviors | .40** | .45** | .70** | .43** | .48** | .51** | – | |
8. Externalizing behaviors | .23* | .51** | .36** | .50** | .33** | .28* | .56** | – |
*
We performed mediational analyses using the Process Macro for SPSS (
Predictor | β | Bootstrap 95% CI |
Model | |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
DV: Internalizing behaviors | ||||||
Total effects | .28 | < .001 | ||||
Adult-related conflict | .13* | .04 | ||||
Child-related conflict | .41** | .12 | ||||
Direct effects | .01 | > .05 | ||||
Indirect effect via mediator |
||||||
Adult-related conflict | .06* | .03 | .00 | .14 | ||
Child-related conflict | .20* | .08 | .08 | .41 | ||
Indirect effect via mediator |
||||||
Adult-related conflict | –.01 | .00 | –.02 | .00 | ||
Child-related conflict | .07 | .07 | –.07 | .22 | ||
Indirect effect via mediator |
||||||
Adult-related conflict | .00 | .02 | –.02 | .05 | ||
Child-related conflict | .01 | .03 | –.04 | .11 | ||
Indirect effect via mediator |
||||||
Adult-related conflict | .01 | .01 | –.00 | .05 | ||
Child-related conflict | .05 | .04 | –.01 | .17 | ||
DV: Externalizing behaviors | ||||||
Total effects | .27 | < .001 | ||||
Adult-related conflict | .02 | .05 | ||||
Child-related conflict | .62* | .13 | ||||
Direct effects | .05 | > .05 | ||||
Indirect effect via mediator |
||||||
Adult-related conflict | .00 | .02 | –.03 | .07 | ||
Child-related conflict | .01 | .07 | –.11 | .19 | ||
Indirect effect via mediator |
||||||
Adult-related conflict | –.00 | .01 | –.05 | .02 | ||
Child-related conflict | .21 | .09 | .05 | .41 | ||
Indirect effect via mediator |
||||||
Adult-related conflict | .02 | .02 | –.01 | .08 | ||
Child-related conflict | .03 | .03 | –.02 | .13 | ||
Indirect effect via mediator |
||||||
Adult-related conflict | .00 | .01 | –.03 | .02 | ||
Child-related conflict | –.00 | .02 | –.05 | .06 |
*
Regarding internalizing behaviors, only both the total effects of adult-related and child-related conflict were significant (adult-related: β = .13,
Regarding externalizing behaviors, only the total effect of the child-related conflict was significant (β = .62,
Although many studies have explored associations between marital conflict and child adjustment (
Consistent with literature (
Regarding child-related conflicts, the results were in line with previous literature (
Data also illustrated that child-related conflict, through the mediation of perceived threat and self-blame appraisals, predicted both children’s internalizing and externalizing behaviors, while adult-related conflict, through the mediation of perceived threat, predicted only children’s internalizing behaviors. In other words, contrary to our expectations (H3), our data seemed to strengthen the negative effects of child-related conflict, compared to adult-related conflict, on children’s adjustment. The results that child-related conflict predicted children’s internalizing problems, through the mediation of perceived threat are consistent with the literature that outlined how this type of conflict could promote feelings of sadness, worries and guilt (
In order to explain these results, we can suppose that feeling responsible for inter-parental conflict provided children with a sense of coping efficacy and perceived control over conflict, which increases the likelihood of involvement (
Taken together, our results showed that: 1) high levels of adult-related inter-parental conflict promoted children’s internalizing behaviors, through the mediation of perceived threat appraisals; 2) high levels of child-related inter-parental discord promoted both children’s internalizing and externalizing behaviors, through the mediation of perceived threat and self-blame appraisals. In conclusion, child-related conflict, compared to adult-related conflict, assumed the role of a particularly significant risk factor for the children’s adjustment, making children vulnerable to the onset of both internalizing and externalizing problems.
Several limitations of this study should be noted. First, the real direction of relations among variables examined in this study cannot be empirically evaluated, because the research design of this study is cross-sectional. The nature of our cross-sectional data cannot explicitly identify directional effects or causal links, while longitudinal data could provide stronger evidence of directionality or causality. The small number of participants may limit the generalizability of our results, even though this limitation was partly overcome by the use of the bootstrapping procedure for the mediational analyses. Another limitation of the study is the use of only self-report data. It is now known self-report measures assessing sensitive information can be subject to social desirability and can inflate some of the associations among variables due to shared method variance. We could also outline that the responses of the first and second graders children may bias the study results depending on how research assistants helped these participants. Indeed,
Despite these limitations, our findings helped to advance our understanding of the relationships between distinct forms of marital conflict and children’s adjustment, by examining the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral underlying processes.
The authors have no funding to report.
The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
The authors would like to acknowledge the assistance of professor John Grych for his valuable suggestions and comments in the writing of the manuscript.
The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.