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11 December 2006
Cold Shoulder Or Shouting Match, Children Still The Losers 
Extensive research shows that parental clashes have an adverse emotional and psychological impact on children, but what impact specific types of conflict have on children is less known. Now a new study, published in the journal Child Development, shows that a child's performance at school, social interaction or mental health may be determined by whether parents give each other the silent treatment or go at each other tooth-and-nail. Studying 212 families with 6-year-old children over a 3-year period, researchers found that a parental falling out ending in withdrawal and detachment can be just as damaging as more hostile confrontations. "Taken together, the findings from the present study stress the importance of understanding how parents fight and the implications of this for the broader family system," says lead author Melissa Sturge-Apple, at the University of Rochester. More specifically, mothers became less supportive and emotionally accessible to their children when there had been both hostility and withdrawal between parents, while fathers were affected by withdrawal alone. But while an emotionally unavailable mother may cause some adjustment problems at school, say the researchers, withdrawn fathers can cause children to be more anxious, withdrawn, depressed, or even develop delinquent behaviors. "Our results highlight the possibility that hostility and withdrawal between parents may negatively affect parenting and, in turn, child adjustment over time, and that these types of conflict may have distinct meanings and implications for the child and family system as a whole," concluded Sturge-Apple. Source: Society for Research in Child Development
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