Interparental aggression and young children's representations of family relationships.

Abstract

Children's maternal, self, and marital representations were examined in 46 children 3 1/2 to 7 years old using the MacArthur Story Stem Battery. Children drawn from agencies serving battered women expressed fewer positive representations of their mothers and themselves, were more likely to portray interparental conflict as escalating, and were more avoidant and less coherent in their narratives about family interactions than children from a nonviolent community sample. Interparental aggression uniquely predicted representations of conflict escalation and avoidance after accounting for parent-child aggression, and the two types of aggression had additive effects in predicting positive maternal representations. The results suggest that witnessing aggression in the family affects children's developing beliefs about close relationships and may be a process by which these experiences give rise to later problems in social and emotional functioning.