Children And Marital Conflict

From leading researchers, this book presents important advances in understanding how growing up in a discordant family affects child adjustment, the factors that make certain children more vulnerable than others, and what can be done to help. It is a state-of-the-science follow-up to the authors' seminal earlier work, Children and Marital Conflict: The Impact of Family Dispute and Resolution. The volume presents a new conceptual framework that draws on current knowledge about family processes; parenting; attachment; and children's emotional, physiological, cognitive, and behavioral development. Innovative research methods are explained and promising directions for clinical practice with children and families are discussed.

For professionals interested in the family, the book describes how parents can handle their differences more effectively, and offers insights into the outcomes that are related to styles of family dispute.

It has long been assumed that family fights have a negative effect on children. Recent findings from research and clinical practice indicate that it is not necessarily the presence of marital conflict that adversely affects children, but, more specifically, how disagreements are handled within the family. Reviewing the now extensive literature on the subject, this volume examines the impact of familial discord on children and presents strategies for clinicians to help parents resolve differences more effectively for the sake of their children, as well as their marriage. Chapters consider the long-term impact of marital discord on children and relate this to what is known about the risk for the development of psychopathology. Reviewing the research on marital interactions in both distressed and nondistressed couples, the authors consider conflict styles of distressed marriages, the bases for marital distress, long-term consequences of marital anger and apathy, and better ways of fighting. The emotional, behavioral, and even physiological impact of interadult and interparental expressions of anger on bystanding children are also examined. Other highlights include: * Models of different styles of family and marital relations * Up-to-date research on family processes * Illustrative case examples * Descriptions of children's responses in both laboratory and field studies * Important, bottom-line prescriptions for therapists, educators, and parents While the review of the scientific evidence on these important questions is exhaustive, the information is presented so that it is accessible to students and parents as well as clinicians, researchers, and academics. This text functions as a resource for clinicians, providing information on clinical processes and outcomes; a guidebook for educators, policy makers, and parents especially in terms of the treatment of issues pertaining to constructive versus destructive methods of dispute; and a scholarly reference for academics and researchers in the child and family areas, offering a state-of-the-art review of current literature.

Papers and commentary from the 1997 Third Annual Wisconsin Symposium on Emotion delve into the nature of emotional interaction with significant others and its role in illuminating the established ties between social relationships and health. Contributors from the fields of affective science, clinical and social psychology, epidemiology, psychoneuroimmunology, and health address how to observe and evaluate social interactions in clinical, laboratory, or daily life contexts, and link emotional experience to health outcomes. Ryff teaches psychology at the University of Wisconsin. Singer is affiliated with the Office of Population Research. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

Interparental Conflict and Child Development provides an in-depth analysis of the rapidly expanding body of research on the impact of interparental conflict on children. Emphasizing developmental and family systems perspectives, it investigates a range of important issues, including the processes by which exposure to conflict may lead to child maladjustment, the role of gender and ethnicity in understanding the effects of conflict, the influence of conflict on parent-child, sibling, and peer relations, family violence, and interparental conflict in divorced and step-families.

This book is concerned with the question of how families matter in young people's development - a question of obvious interest and importance to a wide range of readers, which has serious policy implication. A series of key current topics concerning families are examined by the top international scholars in the field, including the key risks affecting children, individual differences in their resilience, links between families and peers, the connections between parental work and children's family lives, the impact of childcare, divorce, and parental separation, grandparents, and new family forms such as lesbian and surrogate mother families. The latest research findings are brought together with discussion of policy issues raised.

Based on a summer institute of the Family Research Consortium, this book presents theory and research from leading scholars working on issues of risk and resilience in families. Focusing on the splits and bonds that shape children's development, this volume's primary goal is to stimulate theoretical and empirical advances in research on family processes. It will be valuable to developmental, social, and clinical psychologists, sociologists, and family studies specialists.