A genetically informed study of associations between family functioning and child psychosocial adjustment.

Abstract

Research has documented associations between family functioning and offspring psychosocial adjustment, but questions remain regarding whether these associations are partly due to confounding genetic factors and other environmental factors. The current study used a genetically informed approach, the Children of Twins design, to explore the associations between family functioning (family conflict, marital quality, and agreement about parenting) and offspring psychopathology. Participants were 867 twin pairs (388 MZ; 479 DZ) from the Twin and Offspring Study in Sweden (TOSS), their spouses, and children (51.7% female; M = 15.75 years). The results suggested associations between exposure to family conflict (assessed by the mother, father, and child) and child adjustment were independent of genetic factors and other environmental factors. However, when family conflict was assessed using only children’s reports, the results indicated that genetic factors also influenced these associations. In addition, the analyses indicated that exposure to low marital quality and agreement about parenting was associated with children’s internalizing and externalizing problems, and that genetic factors also contributed to the associations of marital quality and agreement about parenting with offspring externalizing problems.

Etiological Contributions to the Covariation Between Children’s Perceptions of Inter-Parental Conflict and Child Behavioral Problems

“…Such results are clearly consistent with recent work using a Children-of-Twins design (Harden et al, 2007; Schermerhorn et al, 2011) as well as past work pointing toward gene-environment correlation as a potential mechanism underlying the relationship between conflict and child adjustment problems (Feinberg et al, 2005; Horwitz et al, 2010; Neiderhiser et al, 1999). Furthermore, because the CPIC provides multiple dimensions of inter-parental conflict from the child’s perspective, specificity in these relationships could also be determined (e.g.., rGE involving threat and internalizing problems and rGE involving self-blame and externalizing problems).…”

“…The Children-of-Twins design, for example, assesses adult twins (with their own families), and thus obtains individual-level report of marital relationships. Research using this more recent design has demonstrated that the relationship between family factors, including marital quality and child adjustment appears to be, in part, genetically-mediated (Schermerhorn et al, 2011). These findings offer further support of shared etiological processes (i.e., potential gene-environment correlations).…”

The role of aggressive personality and family relationships in explaining family conflict.

“…Results coupled with a recent publication from TOSS (Schermerhorn et al, 2010) also enhance our understanding of family dynamics. Schermerhorn et al (2010) revealed that marital quality is linked to child problem behaviors through genetic and environmental pathways, whereas family conflict is linked to child behavior problems family conflict entirely through environmental pathways. The genetic pathway linking marital quality to child problem behaviors suggest that parents’ heritable characteristics influencing marital quality are also transmitted to the child and are expressed as problem behaviors.…”

Adaptive patterns of stress responsivity: A preliminary investigation.

“…In absence of specific information on the reasons for discrepancy between mother- and child-reports, we consider this a sensible approach. Moreover, relying exclusively on children’s evaluation of family conflict has been shown to increase the confounding effect of genetic factors (Schermerhorn et al, 2011). Before computing composite measures, we imputed missing cases with stochastic regression in SPSS; random error was modeled with regression residuals (see Allison, 2002).…”