Children's emotional security in response to marital conflict: the role of emotions and strategies in parents' conflict

Over the last two decades, researchers have shifted their focus from documenting statistically significant associations between children‘s adjustment and marital conflict to constructing theories about how and why conflict affects children. One theory is the emotional security hypothesis that posits that children are negatively affected by marital conflict through three primary responses to it: emotional reactivity, regulation of exposure to marital conflict, and internal family representations. Research has since supported this hypothesis, and demonstrated that children‘s emotional insecurity mediates relationships between marital conflict and poor child outcomes such as internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Because children‘s emotional security appears to be critical in predicting developmental outcomes, the present study sought to better understand what contributes to emotional security. Toward this end, we examined the relative roles of parents‘ emotions and strategies in the context of marital conflict in explaining the variance in children‘s emotional security. We hypothesized that both parents‘ emotional reactions and conflict strategies would be important predictors of children‘s emotional insecurity. In our sample, parents‘ emotions were predictors of children‘s emotional security while marital conflict strategies were not.