Literature Review

Conflicts are a regular phenomenon in family life. It can be assumed that family-centred experiences are at the basis of the child’s development. Therefore, the analysis of the consequences of parental conflicts on the child is of fundamental importance. The effects of parental conflict behaviours on the child’s condition have been widely researched since the 1980’s. However, the focus of this research has predominantly been on the negative consequences of these behaviours. This includes particularly the finding that parental conflicts can lead to children’s maladjustment, which in turn results in negative effects on social, cognitive, educational and psycho-biological functions (Cummings & Davies, 2002). In this literature review, a more differentiated approach to the topic is adopted, which encompasses both positive and negative effects of parental conflict behaviours on the child’s condition and behaviour. A parental conflict is considered a disagreement that leads to a greater or lesser interaction of the parents. This interaction can vary from very positive to very negative (Goeke-Morey, Cummings, & Papp, 2007; Cummings, Goeke-Morey, & Papp, 2003). An extensive analysis of previous research in the field has drawn a distinction between constructive and destructive conflict styles, which shows that parents can adopt different conflict behaviour patterns. At the same time, all children are exposed to familial conflicts, but the majority do not display clinically significant maladjustment (Fincham, 1994). Consequently, two assumptions can be formulated: Firstly, diverse forms of parental conflicts have different effects, some being positive and some being negative (Cummings & Davies, 2002). Hence, the present literature review is based on one research question: Which positive and negative effects do constructive and destructive parental conflict behaviours have on a child’s condition and behaviour? Secondly, moderators and mediators play a major role in this relationship. Therefore, possible moderators as well as mediators will be investigated as the second phase of research of this review.

In the second section of this review, the two theories on the effects of parental conflicts – the cognitive-contextual framework of Grych and Fincham (1990) and the emotional security hypothesis developed by Davies and Cummings (1994) – are explained as they comprise the cognitive, emotional and behavioural aspects of the child’s response to parental conflicts. Furthermore, the third section is about the empirical findings on this topic. Next, the fourth section comprises of an exhaustive discussion of studies relevant to the present research question, alongside with some contradictory results, in order to to integrate these into a theoretical framework. Possible methodological limitations are also discussed and practical implications are derived. And, lastly, both a conclusion and an outlook is provided on the directions of potential research in the future.

Key Theories

Empirical Findings

Various studies have revealed that destructive and constructive conflict styles have different consequences on the child. Specifically, the more destructive the conflict behaviour is, the more negative its effects on the child’s condition and behaviour. In Davies, Myers, Cummings and Heindel’s (1999) study, children watched videos of conflicts and were witnesses of real conflicts afterwards. This study showed that the experience of destructive conflict behaviour provokes more negative reactions than exposure to constructive conflict behaviour. Goeke-Morey et al. (2003) showed videos to children (aged between 8 and 16 years old) and asked them how they would react if their parents argued in this manner. The children indicated that they would intervene or avoid a destructive conflict more than a constructive conflict. Correspondingly, they would react in a more negative emotional way and have a more negative expectation of the conflict’s end in a destructive than in a constructive conflict situation. Cummings, Goeke-Morey and Papp (2003; 2004) used the diary method and questionnaires to measure the parental conflict behaviour. In the former study of Cummings et al. (2003), both the mothers and fathers filled out the questionnaires, whereas in the latter, only the mothers filled them out. These authors found destructive conflict behaviour to be related to more negative emotional reactions and to lead to more aggressive behaviour than a constructive conflict style. Additionally, if the conflict was about the child itself or the marriage, the child’s behaviour was more aggressive (Cummings et al., 2003; 2004). Goodman, Barfoot, Frye and Belli (1999) let parents fill out questionnaires and interviewed children. They found that the more frequent and the more aggressive the parental conflicts were, the less effective the problem-solving strategies of the children tended to be. Using the diary method and questionnaires administered to the parents, Cummings, Goeke-Morey, Papp and Dukewich (2002) found that parents’ negative emotions and destructive conflict behaviours were associated with the child’s insecure emotional and behavioural responses. According to McCoy, Cummings and Davies’ (2009) study, in which the authors administered questionnaires to parents and observed the children’s reactions to their parents’ discussion, destructive conflict behaviours correlate negatively with emotional security. Davies, Martin and Cicchetti (2012) found that a low level of emotional security acted as a mediator between destructive parental conflict and children’s psychological problems. The authors used questionnaires to adolescents and their primary caregivers in their first study and questionnaires and observations in their second study. In a study conducted by Du Rocher Schudlich, White, Fleischhauer and Fitzgerald (2011), parents filled out questionnaires and the researchers analysed the parents’ and the children’s reactions during a parental interaction. In line with other studies on the effects of parental conflicts on children, these authors also investigated children’s reactions to depressive parental conflict styles. A depressive conflict behaviour is a behavioural pattern, in which parents do not argue with each other openly, but instead ignore and backstab each other. The child’s reactions were negative and children were found to be more involved in the conflicts when the conflict behaviour was either destructive or depressive (Du Rocher Schudlich et al., 2011).

Nonetheless, at the other end of the spectrum there is research which suggests that the more constructive the conflict behaviour is, the more positive its effects on the child’s response are. In Lopez Larrosa, Escudero and Cummings’ (2009) study, parents had to fill out questionnaires and discuss different situations at home in the presence of the child. In the case of a constructive conflict behaviour, the children’s intervention was minimal and they continued their own activities. Additionally, the child’s reaction to calm discussions is similar to their reaction to constructive conflict behaviour (Cummings et al., 2003) and there is also a significant relationship between constructive conflict behaviour and better problem-solving skills (Goodman et al., 1999). Parents’ constructive conflict behaviour correlates positively with the child’s emotional security, which in turn is positively related to the child’s prosocial behaviour (McCoy et al., 2009). This finding is in line with the results of Davies et al. (2012), which did not show emotional insecurity as a mediator between constructive parental conflict and children’s psychological problems. Positive emotions and constructive conflict behaviour of the parents have been shown to be related to secure and more positive emotional and behavioural responses of the child (Cummings et al., 2002; Cummings et al., 2003). Du Rocher Schudlich et al. (2011) found that in a constructive conflict situation, the infants intervened less in the parental conflict, showed fewer negative emotional reactions and played more (Du Rocher Schudlich et al., 2011). However, the results of David’s (2009) study are different from the ones of the above-mentioned studies: No relation between positive marital qualities – which included positive emotional observations, constructive conflict behaviours and marital satisfaction of the mother – and positive relationships of children with their peers were found when observing the child’s interactions and analysing questionnaires submitted to the mothers and teachers.

With regards to possible moderators and mediators, the child’s age, gender, temperament, their past experiences with conflicts (parental conflicts and conflicts between strangers), as well as the extent of a conflict resolution, the gender of the parents, parenting practices and psychological control were investigated. The results showed that all of the above-mentioned factors moderate or mediate the relationship between parental conflicts and children’s reactions. Cummings et al. (2003) found the child’s gender and age to be moderators, but did not specify the nature of their influence. Easterbrooks, Cummings and Emde (1994), using observation and questionnaires, revealed that the child’s reaction changes with age: older children showed more positive behaviours if their parents were in harmony. Furthermore, sadness and the motivation to flee have been found to decline with age (Davies et al., 1999). If the children were exposed to destructive conflict styles, the older ones showed less fear, sadness and motivation to flee than the younger ones. Additionally, Davies et al. (1999) found that the motivation to intervene increases with age and peaks during adolescence. These findings are in line with those of Cummings, Zahn-Waxler and Radke-Yarrow (1984), who questioned the mothers of toddlers and primary school children, and with those of Cummings, Vogel, Cummings and El-Sheikh (1989), who showed videos of angry or friendly interactions to children. These previous studies show that the nature and the intensity of the feelings experienced by children change with age: toddlers respond to parental conflicts with crying and anger (Cummings et al., 1984), six- to seven-year-old children with anger, and eight- to nine-year-old children with worry (Cummings et al., 1989). There is also a gender difference: girls responded with more fear and anger than boys (Davies et al., 1999). Howbeit, impeding the case is an interaction between the child’s age and gender: six-year-old boys and ten-year-old girls were mostly motivated to go away, whereas ten-year-old boys wanted to intervene more than the others. In contrast to these studies, Goeke-Morey et al. (2007) did not find the child’s age and gender to be moderators in this process. In their study, parents used the diary method and filled out questionnaires. Their children received a description of a parental conflict situation, watched videos with various conflicts’ endings and were interviewed. David (2009) and Easterbrooks et al. (1994) found that, depending on the child’s temperament, the children’s reactions differed: more temperamental children were more reactive and showed less positive behaviours, less anger and intervened more, whereas children with a higher level of effortful control benefited more from positive marital qualities (Easterbrooks et al., 1994). According to Du Rocher Schudlich et al.’s (2011) study, past experiences with parental conflicts and a child’s temperament moderate the relationship between destructive parental conflict behaviour and the child’s reaction. Destructive conflict behaviour and negative emotional reactions of the child are only significantly related if the children have often experienced parental conflicts or have a less reactive temperament. The extent of a resolution diminishes the negative effects of destructive conflict behaviours (Goeke-Morey et al., 2007). In other words, the more the conflict is resolved, the more positive the emotional reaction of the child was. There are also differences according to an interaction of specific emotions and the parents’ gender. Cummings and Davies (2002) found that specific emotions of the father or the mother acted as a moderator in destructive behaviours. More precisely, the child reacted with negative emotions to the father’s anger or to the mother’s sadness. Goeke-Morey et al. (2003) have revealed that the father’s aggression towards the mother and the mother’s threats to leave the family were particularly stressful. The reason behind the different influences stemming from the interaction of specific emotions and the parents’ gender remains unclear. In the study of Coln, Jordan and Mercer (2013) mothers completed questionnaires. The results showed that parenting practices and psychological control are mediators of the relation between constructive and destructive parental conflict behaviour and child’s internalizing and externalizing problems. Specifically, there were direct paths from destructive parental conflict behaviour to negative parenting practices, psychological control, and child’s internalizing and externalizing problems (Coln et al., 2013).

Discussion

The research question of this review was: “Which positive and negative effects do constructive and destructive parental conflict behaviours have on the child’s condition and behaviour?”. The studies presented confirmed that more constructive conflict behaviours have more positive effects on the children, which include positive emotional consequences (e.g. more positive emotional reactions and increased emotional security) and behavioural outcomes (e.g. more prosocial behaviours and less aggressiveness). Correspondingly, more destructive conflict behaviours have been found to result in more negative effects on the children, which have emotional implications (e.g. more negative emotional reactions and decreased emotional security) and behavioural effects (e.g. more aggressiveness and less effective problem-solving strategies).

Moreover, in the present review, the impact of possible moderators and mediators was addressed. In this respect, it was shown that the child’s age, gender, temperament and past experiences with conflicts (with parental ones as well as with conflicts between strangers), as well as the extent of a conflict resolution and the gender of the parents moderate the relationship between parental conflicts and children’s responses to these. Additionally, parenting practices and psychological control mediate this relationship.

Although the results of the studies generally present a consistent picture, there are some contradictory results. While the results of Goeke-Morey et al.’s (2003) study showed that calm discussions were neither classified as constructive nor destructive in terms of their emotional impact on the child, Cummings et al. (2003) found a positive relationship between calm discussions and childhood gaiety, which leads to fewer adjustment problems. This distinction could be due to the use of different methodologies: While Goeke-Morey et al. (2003) directly examined children, who were watching short films about everyday conflicts of foreign couples, in the study of Cummings et al. (2003), parents used the diary method and filled out questionnaires. No relation between positive marital qualities and positive relations of children with their peers was found (David, 2009), which is contradictory to the theoretical considerations of this review and to the results obtained by both Goodman et al. (1999) and McCoy et al. (2009), showing that children learn behaviour patterns from their parents. Another unclear result of the study conducted by David (2009) is the negative relationship between parental qualities and boys’ relationships with their peers. Interestingly, in the study of Goodman et al. (1999), no significant relationship between children’s perceptions of parental conflicts and their ability to solve problems was found. As such, the results obtained by the studies of both David (2009) and Goodman et al. (1999) need to be replicated and further research is necessary in order to draw conclusions.

The results of the studies presented in this literature review are consistent with the emotional security hypothesis: there are differences in the emotions and in the intervening behaviour, depending on how destructive or constructive the parental conflict behaviour is, because constructive conflict behaviours increase the emotional security of children (Davies et al., 2012; Davies et al., 1999; Du Rocher Schudlich et al., 2011; Goeke-Morey et al., 2003; Goeke-Morey et al., 2007; Lopez Larrosa et al., 2009; McCoy et al., 2009). Regarding the considerations on the cognitive-contextual framework of Grych and Fincham (1990), we can deduce the following: depending on their experience with conflicts, children expect similar behaviour patterns in the future (Goeke-Morey et al., 2003). The emotional reaction to parental conflicts changes with age (Easterbrooks et al., 1994; Davies et al., 1999; Cummings et al., 1984; Cummings et al., 1989). Contrary to the considerations that younger children should show more problem-focused coping behaviours, the results on age-dependent intervening behaviour demonstrate that the motivation to intervene increases with age and peaks in adolescence (Davies et al., 1999). An explanation for it could be that children acquire more experience of conflicts with increasing age and, therefore, they could develop alternative behaviour patterns to those of their parents. Therefore, long-term effects are also to be researched. It remains to be investigated whether calm discussions lead to a more elaborate processing of the conflict by the children and how their attributions influence children’s reactions. Apart from the results obtained in the study of David (2009), other studies tend to show that children seem to learn both constructive and destructive conflict behaviours from their parents. This common result is in line with the theoretical considerations of Zimet and Jacob (2001).

In the studies examined, different methods have been used: the diary method with parents, questionnaires and surveys of children and observations of parent-child interactions. The advantage of the diary methods is the acquisition of current parental conflicts in their natural environments. However, this method also presents some disadvantages. On the one hand, what is directly measured is not the child’s reactions, but instead their parental perceptions, which could differ from the child’s actual reactions. On the other hand, the results obtained using the diary method can be biased by the parents’ sensitisation to this topic through the training, individual interpretations, a person’s definition of a conflict, as well as the motivation and self-discipline of the parents. Another method consists of questionnaires given to children’s adult attachment figures. By doing so, the children’s reactions can be indirectly recorded, but again this depends on the accurate perception by their parents. However, this is an economical method, as it is time- and cost-saving. Another method commonly used consists in presenting conflict situations of strangers to children and assessing their reactions to these, thus documenting the child’s perception and response directly. This method is ethically acceptable because children are less likely to suffer from conflict situations of strangers than from conflict situations of their parents. However, the generalisability of conflicts between strangers to parental conflicts is limited, as parental conflicts represent a more emotional issue for children (Davies et al., 1999). All the same, the child’s reactions to conflicts between strangers are assumed to represent the same response patterns which would have been provoked in a parental conflict situation (Cummings & Davies, 2002). An alternative method is the instruction to imagine those styles of conflict with the child’s own parents, which requires much imagination and is abstract instead of real. Interviews of children presuppose awareness of one’s own feelings and thoughts as well as the language skills to verbalise them. This could lead children to respond in a socially-desirable way. Due to these disadvantages, interviews of children could have been problematic in the study by Davies et al. (1999). It could have led to the result that only adolescents, but not the younger children, differentiated between destructive and constructive conflict styles in their assessment of future conflicts. In contrast to this assumption are the results of the study conducted by Herrera and Dunn (1997), where no correlation between constructive conflict behaviours and children’s emotional understanding and language skills was found. Whether this would be true also with respect to parental conflicts, is yet to be investigated. The method of using observations of parental interactions and children’s responses to these as well as of children’s interactions with peers makes it possible to register and directly encode the nuances of both reactions and interactions. There is a range of situations in which observations take place. Parents’ debates in the laboratory are, depending on the setting, a bit artificial and can influence the conflict behaviour of the parents. If ever the same topics are presented for discussion, as conducted in the study by Lopez Larrosa et al. (2009), they can be compared well, but might be irrelevant for the couples, thus not evoking natural and real emotions. However, interactions in natural settings are related to additional organisational expenses. The combination of different methods compensates for the disadvantages of each method and thus this strategy has been used by most authors (e.g. Cummings & Davies, 2002; Cummings et al., 2003; Cummings et al., 2004; David, 2009; Davies et al., 2012; Du Rocher Schudlich et al., 2011, Easterbrooks et al., 1994; Goeke-Morey et al., 2007; Goodman et al., 1999; Lopez Larrosa et al., 2009; McCoy et al., 2009).

Conflicts between parents are an everyday phenomenon in family life and there are some practical implications which can be identified from this review. The different effects of conflicts, depending on their way of being dealt with, lead to different practical implications. It is supposed that the more destructive a conflict is, the more necessary a change in the conflict style would be, specifically if it is accompanied by hostility, corporal aggression towards the partner or objects, and violence or behaviour patterns which threaten the integrity of the family. Intervention and prevention could have various emphases, such as a focus on the arguing parents, their child or the relationship between these. The goal while focusing on the parents could be to shift their argumentative style from more destructive to more constructive. This would include working on finding a resolution and building good communication skills. If the focus is on the child’s reaction, his/her individual characteristics should be taken into account, such as gender, age, temperament and previous experiences with conflicts. Negative emotions, thoughts and behavioural reactions as well as their behaviour in interaction with peers should be addressed. Concerning the relationship between the arguing parents and their child, the focus of the intervention should be on the preservation of the child’s emotional security. Parents could explain to the child the reason and the result of a conflict, so that the child understands it better and does not make an erroneous attribution. They can also talk to their children about their perceptions and emotions, as this contributes to both a clarification and development of children’s language skills (Herrera & Dunn, 1997). The child could give his/her parents feedback with regards to how he/she has experienced their conflict and what kind of thoughts he/she has. This could bring to mind the points to improve. However, all these practical implications are dependent on the motivation of the parents and of the child.

To conclude, parental conflict behaviours can vary from very destructive to very constructive, just as the extent of the conflict’s resolution, which constitutes a bandwidth from none to complete resolution. Correspondingly, the impacts of parental conflicts on the emotions and behaviours of children are considered to be a continuum from negative to positive. Both the cognitive-contextual framework of Grych and Fincham (1990) and the emotional security hypothesis of Davies and Cummings (1994) serve as theoretical frameworks for the searching and the interpretation of related studies. Since the former theory focuses on the cognitive and behavioural aspects of the effects of parental conflicts on the child’s condition and behaviour and the latter theory on the emotional ones, they complement each other. The results of the studies presented in this literature review generally support these two theories: parental conflicts, depending on the conflict style, can either increase or weaken children’s emotional security and children learn conflict behaviours from the parental model. There are several variables that moderate or mediate this relationship. The question of how to measure the effects of parental conflicts is an ethical, economical and scientific challenge, because the various methods present different advantages and disadvantages. Therefore, a combination of various methods is recommended. Future research should focus, on the one hand, on the replication of findings of a few studies; and on the other hand, on whether the different aspects of parents’ conflict behaviours comprise individual or cumulative effects or not. In addition to the research about the impacts of constructive and destructive conflict behaviours, the effects of the depressive conflict behaviour are also to be investigated. Furthermore, long-term effects of parental conflicts on children’s condition and behaviour could be examined. Foreasmuchas, the research of the effects of parental conflicts on the child and its practical implications will remain of central importance and topical in the future.