Typologies of daily relationship quality in marital and parent-child subsystems: Implications for child adjustment.

Abstract

The ways in which marital relationships (MR) affect parent-child relationships (PCR) vary from day-to-day and differ from one family to another. The day-to-day fluctuations of MR-PCR associations and the between-family differences, however, have been largely overlooked in the literature. Using daily diary data from 152 mother-father couples (with a 7- to 17-year-old child) across three consecutive years, we identified typologies based on parents' daily relational dynamics and examined the association between family typologies and child adjustment. State space grids of daily relationship quality (i.e., MR and PCR) were constructed for each parent at each wave of assessment. Grid-sequence analysis was subsequently conducted to identify multiple family typologies, including cohesive, fluctuating cohesive, spillover, compensatory, and moderate relationship typologies. Some typologies changed over the years and differed for fathers and mothers (e.g., the compensatory typology). Child adjustment problems were the highest in children from families with poor MR and PCR quality (i.e., the spillover typology). Overall, our results evince the heterogeneous nature of family relationship dynamics and the developmental implications of these typologies. For practitioners and therapists who work with families, our findings highlight the value of improving marital and parent-child relationship quality in promoting positive child outcomes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).