Adamson University

900 San Marcelino St., Ermita, Manila, Philippines

GRADUATE SCHOOOL

MPsy605- Applied Child and Adolescent Development

MARITAL CONFLICT AND CHILDREN’S ADJUSTMENT

I. What is the cognitive-contextual framework?

What mechanisms account for the association between marital

conflict and child problems?

1. Modeling
2. Martial conflict as stressor
3. Parent-child relationships

A. Properties of Conflict Episodes

1. Intensity
2. Content
3. Duration
4. Resolution

B. The Context of Conflict

1. Distal Context
1.1 Previous experience with conflict
Children’s past experience with interparental conflict affects
their sensitivity to conflict and creates expectations about the
course of conflict episodes. However, other types of conflict may
 also affect children’s processing of marital conflicts such as
previous conflicts between parents and the child and his or her
siblings.

1.2 Perceived emotional climate

This refers to the child’s perception of family relationships.
A warm, supportive family environment serves as a protective
factor against stress for children. Children may feel secure in a
family that they perceive as warm and cohesive and feel less
threatened when conflict occurs.

1.3 Temperament
Children’s temperament may affect the relationship
between marital conflict and their adjustment in three ways:
 Some children are more reactive to stressors of all kinds.
 Temperament may influence children’s behavioral
responses.
 Children’s temperament affects the development of parent-
child relationships.

1.4 Gender
It is plausible that different socialization experiences may
lead to different affective and behavioral responses to conflict in
boys and girls. Boys may be less likely to cry or exhibit distress
than girls and more likely to act aggressively.

2. Proximal Context
2.1 Expectations for the course of conflict
2.2 Current mood

C. Children’s Processing of Conflict

3.1 Primary processing
The child attends to the conflict and extracts information
regarding its negativity, threat, and self-relevance.. The child’s
perception of conflict thus leads to an affective evaluation of the
event as threatening or benign.

3.2 Secondary processing

The child further extracts information is extracted from the
situation in an effort to understand and cope with the conflict.
Children try to discover why the conflict is occurring (causal
attribution), who is responsible (responsibility attribution), and
whether they have adequate skills for successfully coping with
the conflict (efficacy expectation).

3. Affect
 Observing marital conflict is likely to produce some degree of
negative emotional responses to anger between others, distress
and anger are the most common. Negative affect may interfere
 with memory fr positive events, making it difficult for children
to regulate their emotional responses. Further, some children
may be overwhelmed by their emotional reaction and not
engage in secondary processing. Also younger children tend to
feel anger, whereas older children tend to feel distress.

4. Coping skills
Two general classes of coping responses:
 Problem-focused strategies are direct attempts to alter a
stressful event, such as children’s attempt to regulate one’s
emotional response instead of attempting to change the
situation.
 Emotion-focused strategies are attempts to regulate one’s
emotional response instead of attempting to change the
situation.

II. Emotional Security Hypothesis

A. What is emotional security hypothesis?

 Emotional security is seen as a product of past experiences with

marital conflict and as a primary influence on future responding.
It plays a central role as an immediate mediator in situations in
which children are exposed to parents’ conflict, and it is also an
internalized representation in a trait sense.
 Emotional security hypothesis claims that some forms of family
conflict can contribute to children’s sense of emotional security
and that other forms of undermining.
 Children’s emotional security has long been seen as influenced by
the quality of parent-child relations, specifically the quality of
parent-child attachments, or the emotional bond that develops
between the parent and the child. Attachment security derives
from children’s experiences with parents. Emotional warmth,
reponsitivity, and stability in parent-child relations foster the
development of secure attachments.
 Secure attachments facilitates children’s regulation of negative
emotional arousal.
 Security of attachments predicts children’s socialization, self-
confidence, and cognitive performance throughout childhood and
adolescence.

B. What are the impacts of children’s emotional security on their

functioning?

1. Emotional security affects children’s regulation of their own emotion and

physiological functioning, including subjective feeling states, overt
behavioral expressions of emotion, and physiological functioning.

2. Emotional security, serving a motivational function, guides children to

 cope with family events by motivating them to regulate or attempt to
regulate their parents’ behavior.

3. Emotional security affects children’s cognitive appraisals and internal

representations of family relationships.

C. What does exposure to marital conflicts have on children?

1. Emotional Security and Contexts of Marital Discord

 Frequency. Exposure to more frequent episodes of interparental

conflict leads to greater distress in children and a greated incidence
of behavior problems, and conversely the cessation of conflict is
associated with a reduction of problem behaviors.

 Form/Intensity. Exposure to more intense forms of marital conflict,

such as conflict involving physical aggression, is also related to child
problems and is more upsetting to children than less intense
conflict.

 Content. Marital conflict over child rearing is a better predictor of

child behavior problems than either global marital distress or
conflicts in areas not related not related to child rearing. Fights over
child rearing are also associated with internalizing symptomatology.
Children’s emotional insecurity, as reflected by fear and anxieties, is
increased when conflicts concern about them.

 Resolution. Resolution reduces children’s negative emotions to

interadult conflict.

2. Relations between Marital Conflict and Adjustment

 Emotional insecurity derives from children’s experiential history with

destructive marital conflict.

 Greater experiential history predicts more negative emotions and

greater behavioral reactivity.

 Increased emotional insecurity predicts adjustment problems.

3. Children’s Age, Sex, Temperament

 Age. Children respond to unresolved anger between adults with

visible upset or with reports of distress or anger. Preschoolers
often mediate parent’s disputes by comforting or distracting them.
The disposition to mediate increases sharply at approximately
preschool age and may increase through middle adolescence.
  Sex. Aggressiveness and conduct problems are more common in
boys, whereas withdrawal and anxiety are more prevalent in girls.

 Temperament. Children with difficult temperaments are less

sensitive to positive events and more reactive to negative
events than children with easy temperaments.
D. What is the impact of marital conflict on parent-child relations?

1. Parenting
2. Child management techniques

References

Economic and Social Research Council. (2013). Why family conflict affects some
children more than others. Retrieved March 15, 2020 from
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130508092835.htm

Grych, J.H. & Fincham, F.D. (1990). Marital conflict and children’s adjustment: A
cognitive -contextual framework. Psychological Bulletin, 108(2), 267-290.

Mcintosh, J. (2010). Children’s responses to separation and parental conflict.

Every Child, 16(2).

Saika, R. (2017). Broken family: Its causes and effects on the development of
children. International Journal of Applied Research, 3(2), 445-448.

Davies, P.T. & Cummings, E.M. (1994). Marital conflict and child adjustment: An
emotional security hypothesis. Psychological Bulletin, 16(3), 387-411.