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

Abstract

Parents’ frequent destructive conflicts may lead children to respond to these disputes in maladaptive ways and these distressing and maladaptive responses, in turn, may lead to psychopathology in children. Child behavioral dysregulation was examined as a mediator between marital conflict and child internalizing and externalizing symptoms as well as parents’ future conflicts in a sample of 235 children and their parents. Parents reported on study variables over three annual measurement occasions beginning when their children were 6 years old and autoregressive controls were included for destructive marital conflict and initial levels of children’s symptoms of psychopathology. Results based on structural equation modeling showed that behavioral dysregulation mediated the relationship between destructive marital conflict and children’s internalizing and externalizing symptoms. In addition, children’s behavioral dysregulation mediated the relationship between parents’ initial levels of destructive conflict and their later conflicts, indicating that children’s responses did not serve to reduce parents’ future conflicts, but were in fact related to an increase in destructive disputes over time. Findings of the current study suggest that children’s behavioral dysregulation is a maladaptive response to marital conflict, associated with risk for children’s development of internalizing and externalizing symptoms and heightened destructive marital conflict. Discussion makes suggestions for future research regarding children’s responses to marital conflict.