More Off Notes for Offspring

It's not just that marital disagreements influence the emotional development of the children. Some fighting strategies couples use are particularly bad for kids.

When couples are mutually hostile, hurling contempt at each other, attacking each other's beliefs, feelings, and character, their children grow up showing antisocial behavior, finds a team of psychologists.

And when partners are locked in a pattern in which the husband withdraws in anger, the kids are apt to develop internalizing problems such as anxiety and social withdrawal. Children respond with increased distress, shame, and self-blame.

It's possible that kids are modeling the powerful negative behaviors of their parents, reports John M. Gottman, Ph.D., of the University of Washing-ton. Or they sense that their parents' marriage is fraying and act out their fears of divorce, or sacrifice themselves to distract their feuding folks.

Gottman and Lynn Fainsitber Katz, Ph.D., looked at 56 families over three years. They first evaluated the children between ages four and five, when the ability to regulate emotion develops. Three years later, the children of withdrawing men appeared to be modeling their father's withdrawal. The children of mutually hostile parents had developed externalizing behaviors. Antisocial behavior showed in an inability to wait their turn, a tendency to disobey or break rules, and an expectation that others should conform to their wishes.

There's a gender twist as well, the team reports in Developmental Psychology (Vol 29, No. 6). A parent's marital conflict style plays out hardest on the opposite-sex child, perhaps because kids may ally themselves with the same-sex parent.