ABSTRACT
The marital system affects children both through the implications that children draw for their own functioning as a result of exposure to conflict and by altering parenting practices in interaction with the children. Moreover, from a therapeutic perspective, recent research suggests that educating parents about better handling conflict may improve both the quality of marital and parent-child relationships, as well as have positive effects in terms of children's adjustment. Marital conflict and violence does not stand as an isolated influence on the child, but is associated with multiple forms of dysfunction within the family that have potentially negative implications for children's adjustment, including divorce, maternal depression, alcoholism, and sexual and physical abuse. Relations between marital conflict and children's adjustment problems are often reported in nonclinical samples, but are even more robust predictors of childhood disorders in clinical samples, particularly when there is marital violence. Marital conflict is also linked with increased aggressivity and other problems between the siblings in families.
