Child Behavioral Dysregulation as a Mediator between Destructive Marital Conflict and Children’s Symptoms of Psychopathology

The interparental relationship: Meta-analytic associations with children’s maladjustment and responses to interparental conflict.

“…Elevated levels of interparental conflict are hypothesized to undermine children’s security and elicit greater efforts to regulate the threatening nature of the interparental conflicts through attempts to avoid or become involved in conflicts. Involvement in many cases, may take the form of greater behavioral dysregulation characterized by acting out, impulsivity, volatility, and emotional outbursts (see Table 2; Davies & Cummings, 1994; Warmuth, Cummings, & Davies, 2018). Within the cognitive-contextual framework, interparental conflict is hypothesized to affect children’s problem-focused coping (e.g., intervening in the conflicts) and emotion-focused (e.g., avoidance) coping through children’s emotional processing and cognitive appraisals of the conflict (Grych & Fincham, 1990).…”

Interparental conflict as a quadratic predictor of children’s reactivity to interparental conflict and school adjustment: Steeling effects or risk saturation?

“…For example, meta‐analytic findings have shown that children's emotional reactivity, involvement, and behavioral dysregulation are predicted by their experiences with interparental conflict and, in turn, predict their subsequent mental health problems (Rhoades, 2008; van Eldik et al, 2020). Longitudinal studies have also documented that dimensions of children's reactivity to conflict mediate the risk posed by interparental conflict during early and middle childhood (Cummings et al, 2006; Davies, Cicchetti, et al, 2012; Warmuth et al, 2018).…”

Interparental Conflict on Italian Adolescent Adjustment: The Role of Insecurity within the Family

“…Interestingly, analyses suggested that emotional insecurity in the family was not related to adolescents’ adjustment, and that emotional insecurity in the interparental relationship had stronger effects than emotional insecurity in the family. Subsequent analyses, however, indicated that the effect of emotional insecurity in the parent-adolescent relationship was not significantly different from that of emotional insecurity in the interparental relationship, highlighting the extent of the impact of interparental conflict on the parent-adolescent relationship (Warmuth et al, 2018). While we were unable to definitively show that emotional insecurity in the interparental relationship had the strongest indirect association, our findings did suggest, contrary to our hypothesis, that emotional insecurity in the family was not the strongest mediator.…”