Marital conflict, divorce, and children's adjustment

This article summarizes current research on children's adjustment after separation and divorce, and then focuses on the contributions of marital conflict, marital violence, and hostile family environments to children's adjustment during marriage and after divorce. Children living in marriages with frequent and intense conflict are significantly more likely to have substantial adjustment problems before parental divorce and compromised parent-child relationships. These findings suggest that the deleterious effects of divorce per se have been overstated, with insufficient attention paid in the clinical and research literature to the damaging effects of highly troubled marriages on children's adjustment.