Relationship Ripple Effects
In marriage, as in life, thoughts and behaviours produce ripple effects. And those ripple effects shape the trajectory of your relationship. For example:
- you’re frequently attentive to your spouse, it makes them happy, and so they face your relationship challenges more optimistically and resiliently;
- you experience new adventures together, laughing and supporting one another through it, and it subsequently strengthens your romantic relationship;
- you’re thoughtful in how you communicate with your spouse which helps them to maintain positive emotions, and so they engage in more healthy relationship behaviours in return.
But the effects don’t just stop at your romantic relationship. How you relate to one another affects, for example, your self-image, your emotional and physical health, your motivation to pursue your personal goals, and your children’s wellbeing and development, too.
And whilst the effects of the mother-child relationship garners a great deal of attention – understandably as the mother is in most cases the primary caregiver – fathers and their impact on children has received much less attention in the research literature. However, more studies are now addressing this gap.
Fathers Approach To Conflict Impacts Their Children’s Socioemotional Development
Researchers set out to identify how marital conflict (general verbal disagreements rather than domestic violence) affected how fathers impact their children’s socioemotional development at age 4-5 years by extracting data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort (ECLS-B) [1].
To explain what is meant by socioemotional development, ‘Social emotional development includes self-concept, self-efficacy, the ability to express feelings appropriately, identify and respond to the feelings of others and to form and sustain social relationships with peers and adults.’ [2]
From the longitudinal study, data for 3,955 families with fathers aged, on average, 36.61 years old, was extracted. The sample contained reports from both fathers and mothers about their marital conflicts and their children’s socioemotional development.
Their key findings were as follows:
- The higher the frequency of marital conflict reported by fathers, the less father involvement took place (e.g ’help child to bed’, ‘playing games with children’, and ‘prepare food’), and the less parenting warmth (e.g. ‘I express my affection by hugging, kissing, and holding my child’, and ‘I am easygoing and relaxed with my children’), and the higher the fathers’ parenting stress (e.g. ‘child is more work than pleasure’).
- The higher the frequency of marital conflict, the lower children’s socioemotional skills in preschool as per mothers’ reports (e.g. ‘child volunteers to help others’, and ‘child seems unhappy’).
- The more frequently fathers engaged in constructive conflict resolution, the higher their parenting involvement and parenting warmth.
- When fathers engaged in average and higher levels of constructive conflict resolution frequency, father warmth determined how much the frequency of marital conflict affected their children’s socioemotional skills.
So what else do these results tell us and how can you apply these findings to your marital life and parenting life?
Insights Lead To Solutions
Father Warmth
The research demonstrates that a father’s warmth plays an important role in helping his children develop socioemotional skills. This could in part be due to the child experiencing visual, auditory and tactile representations of love and caring.
It is also likely, then, that these fathers also positively reinforce their children’s good behaviour.
All of this allows for the child’s healthy development, neurologically and biologically [3, 4], as well as better learning.
And it’s not that a father wouldn’t necessarily care to be warm but, rather, that the ripple effect of marital disagreements may hinder his thoughts about himself (self-image), and if he is not great at emotion regulation, then the discord between him and his spouse could disrupt his ability to relate well to his young child.
Also, for some people, it can be difficult to not let the experience of distress permeate every aspect of their lives, including their interactions with others. For example, those who have a tendency to ruminate, those who struggle with emotion-regulation, like someone with post-traumatic-stress-disorder for example, and those who are presently experiencing lots of emotional upheaval on several fronts at the same time leading to overwhelm and anxiety.
Father’s Constructive Conflict Resolution
As fathers’ constructive conflict resolution was linked to higher father involvement and father warmth, the research suggests fathers should adopt skilful conflict resolution strategies for dealing with marital conflict so as to protect their children from its negative ripple effect.
Even if an issue is not fully resolved immediately, the mere approach of solution-finding and being proactive will calm both spouses down, at least in the short-term, and help them to feel more resilient and empowered. This in turn will positively affect their interactions with their children.
Importantly, though, this does not mean that the responsibility for how marital disagreements are handled, lie with the husband because if the husband engages in constructive conflict resolution but the wife engages in unhelpful tactics such as stonewalling, the outcomes will still be frustrating for the husband and will add to his stress and distress. So both parents do still need to mutually engage in constructive conflict resolution.
Change The Pattern By Changing Yourself
What you have been doing is not what you have to keep on doing. Change whatever needs changing.
Change your mutual conflict resolution style from destructive to constructive.
Alter how you deal with stress so that it is less debilitating, time-consuming, energy-sapping and distracting.
And keep the fun and romance alive between you and your spouse as that can have far reaching consequences for your marriage, including the extent to which things like intimacy and adventure can buffer you both from the negative effects of relationship and life stress.
To help you further, here are 3 foundational strategies to implement into your daily lives:
1. Live Mindfully
Live as mindfully as possible so that you are aware of what is happening within you and around you and how your loved ones are feeling, what they are thinking and how they are behaving. This will assist many things including being able to quickly identify issues, and recognise how your approach to those issues is serving or sabotaging your relationships, wellbeing, self-image, and more.
2. Engage In Emotion-Regulation As Required
Get better at emotion-regulation and live mindfully enough to notice your personal tell-tale signs that you need to regulate your emotions from negative back to positive as quickly as possible. And create your own ‘go-to’ emotion-regulation strategies that work best for you as and when you need them to.
3. Create A Compassionate Home
Immerse your family in an environment conducive to growth. Self-compassion and other-compassion is vital for happy relationships as it allows for challenges and mistakes to be overcome with greater optimism, resilience, and confidence. It also allows you to demonstrate these skills to your children, both as they watch you, their parents, and as you then utilise these skills with your children, too.
Little By Little
Changing your life around doesn’t have to take years and it doesn’t have to be complicated. In my experience, it rarely does and rarely is.
Disagreements are a natural part of marriage and help you to grow closer when you both use the right approach, successfully resolve the issues, and take the lessons learnt into your future. And keep in mind that when it comes to your and your loved ones’ happiness and health, you should always be proactive.
Take consistent steps towards a better relationship with one another, reduce the frequency of your marital conflicts, increase your relationship skills, reduce your stress, increase your wellbeing, and remember that it’s often the smallest things that make the biggest difference.
References
1. Gong, Q., Kramer, K. Z., & Tu, K. M. (2023). Fathers’ Marital Conflict and Children’s Socioemotional Skills: A Moderated-Mediation Model of Conflict Resolution and Parenting. Journal of Family Psychology, 37(7), 1048-1059. https://doi.org/10.1037/fam0001102
2. Rymanowicz, K. A., Moyses, K. J., & Zoromski, K. S. (2020). ‘School Readiness’, in J. B. Benson (Ed), Encyclopedia of Infant and Early Childhood Development (Second Edition). United States: Elsevier, pp. 55-64.
3. Smith, K.E., Pollak, S.D. Early life stress and development: potential mechanisms for adverse outcomes. Journal of Neurodevelopmental Disorders, 12, 34 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s11689-020-09337-y
4. Boyce, W. T., & Ellis, B. J. (2005). Biological sensitivity to context: I. An evolutionary-developmental theory of the origins and functions of stress reactivity. Development and Psychopathology, 17(2), 271–301. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954579405050145
