Spillover in the Home: The Effects of Family Conflict on Parents' Behavior

Friction is a normal part of everyday family life. Parents use conflictual, irritable behavior to communicate that their spouses or children have engaged in unwanted actions. Unfortunately, turbulence in one relationship tends to spread into other relationships, and discord seems to be particularly contagious between the marital and parent-child dyads. The effects of discord in one dyad on the other may amplify the long-term negative outcomes of frequent marital and parent-child conflict that are observed in all members of the family.Marital discord is associated with parents' harshness, inconsistency, psychological control, and reduced acceptance of and sensitivity with their children (Benson, Buehler, & Gerard, 2008; Buehler, Benson, & Gerard, 2006; Klausli & Owen, 2011; for reviews on this topic, see Erel & Burman, 1995; Krishnakumar & Buehler, 2000). In fact, the link between marital discord and parenting may partly explain the association between highly conflictual marriages and child emotional outcomes (Chung, Flook, & Fuligni, 2009; Schulz, Waldinger, Hauser, & Allen, 2005). In the reverse direction, a more limited literature indicates that difficulties between parents and children also affect marital relationships and parents' emotional distress (Almeida, Wethington, & Chandler, 1999; Jenkins, Simpson, Dunn, Rasbash, & O'Connor, 2005; VanderValk, Spruijt, de Goede, & Meeus, 2007).Traditional correlational designs limit the potential for new knowledge about the spread of conflict within families. Although tensions in the marital and parent-child dyads are known to be closely linked, the research literature has less to say about the day-to-day mechanisms by which difficulty in one dyad is transmitted to the other. As a result, researchers have called for process-oriented research to begin to clarify the why and how of established associations between marital and parent-child discord (Cummings & Davies, 2002). Examining daily within-family conflict processes offers an opportunity to take a more detailed look at one potential step along the long pathway from one day's conflictual encounters to long-standing patterns of relational, behavioral, and emotional disturbances in parents and children. Furthermore, assessing short-term within-person processes allows the examination of the day-to-day effects of conflict against the backdrop of the individual's own typical behavior (as opposed to the whole sample's typical behavior), which limits the influence of individual traits, shared genes and environments, and Gene × Environment interactions. This process-level examination offers unique information about daily fluctuations in behavior as compared to the broad associations between marital and parent-child conflict described in cross-sectional and longterm prospective studies.One mechanism by which tension in one family dyad may affect the other dyad on a daily basis is the short-term effects that conflictual encounters have on parents' behavior. Spillover occurs when a stressful experience in one context (e.g., marital conflict) has a direct short-term impact on an individual's affect or behavior in another context (e.g., by increasing the parent's irritability in an interaction with a child; Almeida et al., 1999; Bolger, DeLongis, Kessler, & Wethington, 1989; Repetti, 1987, 1994). A handful of studies have examined short-term effects of marital and parent-child conflict on other family dyads using within-subject methods such as daily diaries (Almeida et al., 1999; Bolger, DeLongis, Kessler, & Wethington, 1989; Chung et al., 2009; Kitzmann, 2000; Margolin, Christensen, & John, 1996). These studies have observed a link from marital conflict to tension in the parent-child relationship on the same or the next day, including both affective (e.g., increases in distressed mood) and behavioral (e.g., disagreements) changes (Almeida et al., 1999; Bolger, DeLongis, Kessler, & Wethington, 1989; Chung et al. …