At the Heart of Family Conflict
By Nicole St.Pierre
In Gayla Margolin’s lab, a pre-adolescent boy sits alone in a room
wearing headphones. From an audiotape, sounds of imaginary scenarios
echo in his ear. In one, parents loudly argue. In another, a suitcase
slams closed. In the most violent, glass shatters.
The recording asks the boy how he would respond to each imaginary
scenario if he overheard his parents arguing that way. Speaking into a
microphone, the boy says he would stand between his parents and try to
break up the fight.
It’s these coping responses that intrigue Margolin, a psychology
professor who studies how children respond to different dimensions of
marital conflict.
“Our lab tries to understand why some children blame themselves and
intercede when their parents fight while others just go outside and
play with the dog” she says.
The answer may depend on whether in the past the family’s marital
conflicts have turned aggressive and violent. Margolin’s research shows
that once violence has occurred in a family, future conflicts elicit
heightened apprehensions in family members.
For instance, boys who come from families even with low levels of
aggressive marital behaviors (such as pushing and shoving) tell
Margolin they would physically try to break up a fight between their
parents. These same boys also are more likely to exhibit anxiety,
depression and social problems.
“Most parents really don’t understand the impact that low-level
violence can have on their children, even when it’s not done directly
in front of them. The door may be closed during a fight, but most
children hear more than their parents think, or wish, they heard,” says
Margolin.
Trained as a clinical psychologist, she got her start as a marital
researcher and later became interested in the effects of marital
conflict and violence on children.
“Adults have a choice about whether to stay in relationships, but
children don’t have a choice about the families in which they grow up,”
says Margolin.
To gather data, she turns to Los Angeles families. As volunteers, the
families provide information about their lives, including actual family
discussions and daily journal entries. (Of the families she studies, 30
percent report episodes of husband to wife aggression in the past
year.) With funding from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation,
Margolin follows the volunteers over three years to understand the
cumulative effects of violence on children.
Margolin has found that families with financial and parenting stress
have high potential for child abuse if husband-to-wife aggression also
exists in the home.
“What I want to understand are ways that violence exposure affects the
subtle, everyday dynamics of family interactions,” says Margolin. “We
are learning, for example, that children’s violence exposure is related
to erosions in parental support. Children who may need the most
parental support actually appear to receive less empathy and more
irritability from their parents.”
These are small but pervasive patterns of daily life that can impact
how a child copes, particularly through the transition into
adolescence, she says. Often children’s coping strategies mimic their
parents’ behavior. Take a family’s response in the wake of a natural
disaster, for example.
Prior to the Northridge earthquake that shook southern California in
1994, Margolin was working with numerous families, monitoring their
behaviors and conducting research. Several months after the earthquake
struck, she sent out a series of questionnaires to this same group of
families.
“Surprisingly, we found that most families did not experience high
levels of conflict after the disaster. Instead, families seemed to
rally and pull together,” she says, “with the exception of one group.”
Those families that reported both high levels of marital conflict and
parental symptoms of depression or anxiety before the earthquake
reported increased marital conflict after the earthquake. Moreover,
children’s reactions after the earthquake were not just related to the
natural disaster. The children’s distress was closely related to family
problems before the earthquake occurred—and their parents’ distress
after the earthquake.
“But for the most part, families pulled together, even those families
where conflict was part of a normal routine,” she says. “That was good
news.”
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