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Notre Dame Department of Psychology

Children and Marital Conflict

The Good Divorce

Generation at Risk

For years Father Ted Hesburgh, CSC, Notre Dame’s president emeritus, has given a standard piece of advice to married couples: "If you love your children, love your spouse." The gem of wisdom is as good as Ann Landers’s best and gets the counseling psychologist’s seal of approval. "Kids want two things: they want their parents to be happy, and they want their parents to be together," says ND psychology professor E. Mark Cummings, who with Patrick Davies wrote the book on Children and Marital Conflict.

Generally, a happy marriage means a happy, secure home with happy, secure kids. But what if mom and dad don’t get along? Worse, what if they’re at each other’s throats? What happens then?

Much has been said about the need to protect kids from violence in TV and movies. But the most caustic violence for children occurs "live and in person" in the home, and usually it isn’t even physical or direct. Words between parents can slash and burn their children as well as the intended victims. The resulting wounds can be deep and long lasting. Sometimes the violence may be wordless — the "freeze out." Withdrawal of love and affection can injure just as surely as a fist. When children witness such intense verbal/nonverbal violence, society pays a price.

To say there’s an epidemic of marital conflict in the United States is hardly a news flash. The number of divorced Americans has more than quadrupled from 4.3 million in 1970 to 18.3 million in 1996. For some time now half the marriages have been splitting in divorce. The trend is so well established that 40 percent of all children born in the 1970s and ’80s — today’s teenagers and young adults — have experienced the breakup of their family through divorce. Add in all the kids whose parents are unhappy with each other but don’t divorce and the ones whose parents never married but stay together and fight, and you have a lot of young people witnessing some intense bickering.

The problem is this: When mom and dad do battle there’s often a spillover effect. "Conflict distresses children even though the dispute is not directed toward them," explains child psychologist Robert Emery. "It makes them mad, sad or scared." Researchers say that children as young as 6 months respond to parents fighting. Cummings reports a 1-year-old wiping away a mother’s tears and hugging her.

Kids get sucked into the fray in three ways, he explains. They may be bystanders, mediators or co-combatants. The more involved that children become in their parents’ dispute, the worse it is for their own psychological health. But how a child responds depends a lot on age and gender.

Adolescents around 15 or 16 are the most likely to involve themselves in their parents’ battles, toddlers the least likely, he says. Young children react by throwing tantrums and with other aggressive behavior, while older children are more likely to "keep things inside," often showing depression in late childhood or early adolescence. Typically boys react aggressively while girls often become withdrawn and anxious. Some children, especially some girls, adapt to parental fighting by becoming "too good." To stop the fighting they try to become "perfect children." These are the model kids who do everything right while walking on egg shells, fearing the family will collapse.

There also are three ways that kids cope with fighting parents. They are either "concerned," "angry-ambivalent," or "unresponsive." Most follow the "concerned" path. They are sad that their parents are fighting and wish they would stop, but the children don’t intervene. "Angry/ambivalent" children, meanwhile, are more upset and want to get away or even hit their parents. Unresponsive children, the rarest group, are made angry by the fighting but keep it inside.

Like a sponge, many children absorb their parents hostility. It can bubble out later, to everyone’s detriment. There’s a good chance the bully pounding your kid in the playground has parents who are pounding one another verbally, if not physically. Child development experts report about half of all children exposed to marital conflict exhibit behavior problems — typically excessive aggression, vandalism, depression, anxiety or social withdrawal. Kids from high conflict homes also often do poorly in school.

By far, physical violence between parents is the most toxic form for their children. Studies have shown that the sons and daughters of battered wives are four times more likely to experience mental health problems later. The more fighting kids see, whether physical or verbal, the more sensitive they become to its effects. "They don’t ‘get used to it,’" Cummings observes.

Here’s the really insidious thing about anger between parents: It doesn’t have to be overtly expressed to inflict damage. Children have extraordinary antennae for picking up emotional cues from their surroundings. Body language and tone of voice reveal more than parents realize. They may try to bottle up their ill will, but the poison still seeps out."Exposure to background anger repeatedly has been shown to increase anger in children and increase the likelihood of interpersonal aggression," Cummings and Davies write.

The assumption has always been that divorce ends marital conflict and in that sense is in the best interest of children. But it ain’t necessarily so. In many cases the fighting instead escalates after divorce, Cummings observes. If the battling continues, kids are likely to suffer. In her 1994 book The Good Divorce, sociologist Constance Ahrons reported that only 12 percent of divorced parents maintain friendly relationships with their ex-spouses. "Parental fighting is actually a better forecaster of childrens’ functioning after divorce than changes in marital status," Cummings says. One of the keys is the quality of the family environment during the breakup. The more positive the environment, the less likelihood of injury to the children.

Conventional wisdom declares children are better off when a bad marriage ends. But in their 1997 book Generation at Risk, sociologists Paul Amato and Alan Booth say it’s not that simple. Recent research indicates that the worst situations for children may be high-conflict marriages that last and low-conflict marriages that end.

"For children’s sake some marriages should not be salvaged," they write. "But in marriages that are not fraught with severe conflict and abuse [70 percent of all divorces are in this category] future generations would be well-served if parents remained together until children are grown."

Perhaps the worst thing parents can argue about in front of the children is the children. When kids discover they are Topic A, the antennae go into hyperdrive, often with wounding results. Child-rearing arguments have the biggest impact on kids, studies show. That’s when they feel trapped in the middle and see themselves as the cause of the strife. Too often, they react with shame, self-blame and fear.

Kids often take responsibility for their parents’ fights. Intense drawn-out conflict sets up an emotional minefield in the home. Parents locked in marital strife sometimes unintentionally seek emotional support from their children, Cummings notes. When the roles reverse and children nurture the parents, warning flags should pop up. It is not a good sign if the child feels responsible for the parents’ happiness.

"In chronically and unresolvably negative relationships it is important for parents to explain that their problems are not the child’s fault and the child is not responsible for them," Cummings and Davies write. "Explanations that absolve children from blame reduce their feelings of fear and responsibility, but explanations imputing children as the cause increase their shame and distress."

When behavior problems surface, warring parents often aren’t up to the challenge. Simply put, fighting parents make lousy parents. Conflict between spouses undermines their authority and self-esteem, Cummings explains. When parents are caught up in their own dispute, their judgment is clouded and they have difficulty giving their children the needed supervision and discipline.

A negative pattern often begins. It goes like this: Young Johnny wants to do or have something he shouldn’t. His father says "no." But the kid won’t accept that.He whines, complains, begs, threatens — whatever it takes — until Dad (or Mom) throws up his hands and says "Okay, okay" just to stop the assault. The parent has had enough conflict for the day from the spouse and doesn’t want more. Score: Kid - 1, Parent - 0. Of course, this assures Johnny will return to the same bag of tricks when a similar situation arises. Why not? He won. The parent rewarded the misbehavior, reinforcing it, Cummings points out.

Dueling spouses also are more vulnerable to the tried-and-true kid technique of playing one parent off another, psychologists say. To curry the child’s favor, a parent may let discipline slide. Mom or dad may actively play along with the "play off." Undercutting the authority of the other spouse can be an all-too-handy guerrilla tactic in the Spousal War.

Sometimes fighting parents end up taking out their frustrations on the children, and that can be even more damaging than poor parenting. The parent-child emotional relationship is vitally important, Cummings says. "It is pervasive, affecting both children’s capacity for self-regulation and their social world view." Repeated hostility or neglect can strain the emotional bonds attaching parent and child. Kids who are rejected again and again tend to avoid their parents, while children with neglectful parents are clingy and angry.

Constant hostility can whither a child. Moms and dads who repeatedly berate and belittle their children instill low self-esteem, making them more vulnerable to depression and stress. Kids who are treated poorly by their parents, researchers report, are more likely to misread others’ emotions. "Children from discordant homes selectively pay attention and recall negative events more often than others, are more likely to blame themselves for negative events — a precursor for later depression — and to judge other people as unhappy and angry," says Cummings. What’s most troubling is that once a kid slips into a negative self-image, it sticks like superglue.

Recent research suggests that the bond between fathers and daughters is especially vulnerable. In one study, fathers in less happy marriages were more negative toward their daughters than fathers in happy marriages. Psychologist Patricia Kerig suggests that as fathers withdraw emotionally from their wives they may do the same with their daughters. This may impair later relationships with adult men.

As troubling as all this may be, there actually is some good news: All of the bad things we’ve been talking about don’t have to happen. It’s not that parents fight that is so distressing to children, it’s how they fight.

Conflict is an unavoidable part of life. Even the best marriages experience it. The trick is to keep it from tearing apart you and yours. Virtually every couple disagrees about the usual topics: money, sex, in-laws, day-to-day petty stuff, Cummings notes. Whatever the topic, he says, arguments in marriages spring from four main sources: incompatability, a difference between "how it should be" and "how it is," communication breakdown and different recollections of events.

There is a wrong and right way to fight about these four areas. In fact, psychologists can predict a marriage will fall apart by observing how a couple fights. The first warning sign is a failure to resolve the dispute. "Avoidance and disengagement can indicate a lack of commitment and intense anger can escalate the dispute and prevent resolution," Cummings writes. Second, it’s a bad sign if there is a sense of helplessness. That leads to withdrawal, which heightens alienation. Finally, there’s trouble if there are negative thoughts about the spouse. Negativity feeds on negativity. Bad interactions lead to hostile perceptions, which lead to marital discontent.

According to psychologists, spouses in troubled marriages often engage in something called "negative tracking." They only see the bad side of the spouse, they give no credit for any good behavior. Happily married couples, on the other hand, tend to give their partner the benefit of the doubt when it comes to negative behavior. They chalk it up to "having a bad day," an aberration.

Here are some things the experts say to avoid when fighting: Don’t play the "I’ll see you one and raise you one" game. Couples who dredge up hurts from the past and escalate the hostilities are asking for trouble. Highly emotional and angry fights are dangerous because they make the next step — physical violence — too easy, Cummings warns. It may seem cathartic to vent your spleen at your spouse, but it’s flirting with danger.

The polar opposite of "I’ll see you and raise you" can be just as bad. When husbands and wives disengage and avoid issues, the problem will only fester. When problems stay up in the air, the atmosphere fills with hostility and tension.

Oddly, psychologists believe a certain amount of fighting might be good for a marriage. The key is negotiation and compromise. Researchers report that moderate levels of conflict strengthen a marriage if the conflict is aimed at solving the problem. Goal-oriented conflict is not harmful to spouses or children. In fact, kids benefit when they see their parents work through a disagreement. One study actually found that fighting in a warm, communicative family was associated with optimal adolescent development.

Cummings offers five principles for a "good" fight. First, he says, couples need to establish mutual awareness of the problem. If there’s to be progress, everybody must be on the same page. Also, both spouses must be open-minded, empathetic and flexible at the discussion stage. He recommends focusing on the issue and avoiding negativity. "Getting defensive only increases the likelihood of anger, and anger never helps," Cummings observes.

Second, the psychologist recommends each spouse take turns summarizing what the other has said. This clarifies issues and fosters compromise. Along with this, he recommends limiting the discussion to specific issues and refraining from blame. Maintaining eye contact, nodding to indicate understanding and a positive tone of voice also are helpful.

Third, give your spouse the benefit of the doubt whenever you can. This provides a basis for negotiation, an olive branch even when fights get rancorous. Fourth, be confident about your ability to solve the problem. The confidence becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy by raising motivation and helps with persistence.

Finally, keep things as light as possible. If the conflict starts to heat up, take a time-out, just like you tell your children, Cummings recommends. Take a deep breath, go for a walk, relax. Talk yourself down reasonably and try to pinpoint the things that "set you off." If you follow these principles, the ND psychology professor says, you should have a "good fight." And that should be okay with your kids.

Recent studies suggest that children gauge the overall meaning and message of fights between adults. After an argument they watch to see how parents are feeling toward each other and how well they are getting along as well as how the problem was resolved.

"Some couples fight a lot but generally are happy with their marriage. Their fights end on a positive note. If the children believe that the parents clearly love each other, they are not bothered. Children seem to take in the whole picture, " Cummings says.

That’s the good news.

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