How parental conflicts can do lasting damage to children

Nine-year-old Yahaya quarrels a lot in school with his classmates and other children within the school. He has no patience with his friends, or even his siblings, as he hurls abusive words at them that leave them in a fight a lot of times.

His teachers have noticed this attitude in him and sometimes give him mild punishment as a result of his intolerance and quarrelsome attitude. He has been taken to the school counseling unit where the counselor in the process of counseling him discovered that Yahaya learnt the habit from his parents who often fought in the presence of their children.

The family is defined as the single most important influence in a child’s life. The parents, who are on top of the family organogram, are a child’s first teachers and act as role models in how he/she acts and experiences the world around. By nurturing and teaching children during their early years, families play an important role in making sure the younger ones are ready to learn when they enter school and in the society at large.

A clinical psychologist and author of ‘Generation Text: Raising Well-Adjusted Kids in an Age of Instant’, Dr Michael Osit, said a child first learns about right and wrong in the family, adding that modern parents face many challenges in teaching values.

“Children learn much more from what you do than what you say. Parents can also teach about values by sharing family stories, setting boundaries and serving others,” he said.

A psychotherapist in New York, US and parenting coach, Tamara Gold, said the family is profoundly important to the developmental, emotional and cognitive growth of a child. “A child will learn about relationships, manners, selfesteem, worth and loyalty, all by watching and participating in the family,” she said.

Gold said, nurturing relationships in a family is critical for the healthy development of a child, adding that if children feel safe, secure and loved in their family, it helps with the formation of their self-esteem and wellbeing.

A new research has also revealed that parents who engage in even simple every day conflicts are causing physical and emotional damage to their children, while parents who physically or emotionally abuse their children do them lasting damage, among other things by undermining their ability to trust others and also accurately read their emotions.

The research, published in the current issue of the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, shows that the emotional processing of these children, too, can be affected potentially making them over-vigilant, anxious and vulnerable to distorting human interactions that are neutral in tone and throwing them off-balance interpersonally as adults.

An assistant professor in the University of Vermont’s Department of Psychological Sciences and the lead author of the study, Alice Schermerhorn, said the message is clear, explaining that even low-level adversity like parental conflict is not good for children.

The research results are significant, Schermerhorn said, for the light they shed on the impact relatively lowlevel adversity like parental conflict can have on children’s development.

She added that no one can eliminate conflict altogether but children should be helped to get the message that even when parents argue, they care about each other and can work things out.

A Social Psychologist and Anger Management Coach, Mrs Oluwatoyin Ogunkanmi, said the family centred life is very important to the development of any child, explaining that whenever there is a conflict in the home, it affects the child adversely, such that the child might develop emotional, social behaviour and even mental issues.

Mrs Ogunkanmi also said the child’s academic performance and concentration level may drop as a result of home conflict he/she witnessed.

According to her, parental conflict can make the younger children blame themselves while the older children or teenagers might become unruly and lose respect for their parents.

She also said that the reactions of the child can include fear, anger, anxiety, and sadness making him or her to be at higher risk of experiencing a variety of health problems, disturbed sleep, and difficulty in focusing and succeeding at school.

“The effect of conflict will make the child either express his distress in the form of aggression, hostility, anti-social and non-compliant behaviour, delinquency and vandalism or express it in the form of depression, anxiety, withdrawal and dysphoria. On the social life, it might make the child antisocial, lack self-esteem and confidence,” she said.

Mrs Ogunkanmi added that parents should resolve their differences amicably and not with violence or negative verbal abuse before their children.