Parent Conflict Linked to Child's Health Problems

Moderate amounts of parental conflict can cause distress in the lives of children, disrupting their sleep and causing negative feelings in their day-to-day lives, according to two studies reported in Child Development.

Children even feel distressed when the parents give each other the "silent treatment" in the hope their children will not notice they are angry, says Dr. Patrick T. Davies, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester.

"These kids are still able to pick up on the fact that their parents are unhappy with each other," says Dr. Davies, lead researcher on one of the studies, "and it comes through when you ask them questions about how they feel: they report feeling more fearful, more angry, more sad."

Emotional Lives of Children Studied

In recent years, researchers have been studying how parental interaction affects children, with an eye toward finding the tipping point where problems in a marriage begin to disrupt the emotional lives of children.

One of the new studies looked at sleep. Researchers at Auburn University and Brown University studied 54 healthy children ages eight and nine, interviewing both them and their parents about their family lives.

The children also wore a watch-like device called an Actigraph, which tracks sleep patterns by monitoring movements.

The team found that even moderate amounts of parental conflict - including angry outbursts and belittling comments - can disrupt children's sleep.

In general, children in families with moderate to severe levels of conflict lost about 30 minutes of sleep per night, says study author Mona El-Sheikh, Ph.D., a professor of human development and family studies at Auburn University.

That may not seem like much, she notes, "but this half hour is occurring throughout the night and might prevent them from getting into stages of sleep where they really need to rest."

The result, she says, could be irritability the next day, and other problems.

How much conflict was too much? Dr. El-Sheikh said the conflict level found in typical families was enough to cause problems.

"A lot of them engaged in putting each down verbally, making fun of each other sometimes," she says. "Most families have engaged in some level of that."

The other study was led by Dr. Davies and appears in the same journal.

Researchers from the University of Rochester in New York and the University of Notre Dame tracked 223 six-year-old children and their parents for one year to see how parental conflict affected the youngsters' emotional state.

Hostile or Indifferent Parents a Problem

Children were more likely to suffer from emotional difficulties if their parents engaged in what the researchers described as "hostile or indifferent" interactions with each other.

The researchers wanted to figure out if the children became accustomed to the conflict and felt better over time, or remained troubled at the same level, says Dr. Davies. The latter turned out to be true.

"When kids are exposed to high levels of conflict between their parents, they don't get used to it," he explains. "They become more sensitive and reactive to it."

What should be done? Dr. Davies suggests that parents try to keep their major conflicts behind closed doors, although not necessarily all the time. And Dr. El-Sheikh says parents should make sure to do one thing when they resolve a problem: do it in front of the children.

Always consult your child's physician for more information.