2-065 - Influences and Mechanisms of the Influence of Parental Conflict on Children

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Interparental conflict has substantial implications for children’s socioemotional development. One particularly important area of study involves identifying mechanisms through with these effects occur, which is the focus of this symposium. Reflecting the complexity of such processes (Cummings & Davies, 2010), the presentations in this symposium examine connections between marital conflict and a variety of other factors, including links with parenting and parental mood, violence and household chaos, and children’s cognitive appraisals of conflict. Presentation 1 addresses how combinations of high and low marital conflict and maternal sensitivity are related to mother-child attachment styles. Presentation 2 tests the influence of children’s perceptions of their parents’ conflict on children’s psychological functioning over and above the objectively-rated destructiveness and constructiveness of parents’ conflict. Presentation 3 addresses how domestic violence (i.e., intimate partner violence) and household chaos operate jointly to impact parenting behaviors and in turn, children’s psychological functioning. This presentation focuses on risk and potentiating models of developmental psychopathology, models of family stress and spillover, and their implications for understanding children’s adaptation in high-risk family contexts. Presentation 4 addresses how marital conflict impacts parental mood and further, how parental mood spills over into the parent-child relationship. Together, these presentations identify key mechanisms underlying associations between marital conflict and major domains of child functioning, including psychological functioning, attachment, and parent-child relationship functioning.

Sub Unit

• Family Context & Processes

Chair

• Holly Weldon, University of Vermont

Individual Presentations

• The Joint Effect of Marital Conflict and Maternal Sensitivity within the First Year in Prediction of Infant Attachment - Presenting Author: Jin Qu, Clarion University of Pennsylvania, Clarion, PA; Non-Presenting Author: Esther Leerkes, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

• Predicting Children’s Reactions to Interparental Conflict: Coder-Rated Conflict Characteristics Versus Children’s Perceptions - Presenting Author: Holly Weldon, University of Vermont; Non-Presenting Author: Alice Schermerhorn, University of Vermont

• The Interplay Among Domestic Violence, Household Chaos, Parenting Practices, and Preschool Children’s Psychological Adjustment - Presenting Author: Jesse L. Coe, Alpert Medical School of Brown University; Non-Presenting Author: Laura Frank, Bradley/Hasbro Research Center; Non-Presenting Author: Stephanie H. Parade, Bradley Research Center/Brown University; Non-Presenting Author: Ronald Seifer, Brown University; Non-Presenting Author: Audrey R. Tyrka, Brown University/Butler Hospital

• Parent Mood as a Mechanism Linking Daily Spillover between Marital Conflict and the Parent-child Relationship - Presenting Author: Chrystyna Kouros, Southern Methodist University; Non-Presenting Author: Michael Ovalle, Southern Methodist University