Conference Proceedings - School of Nursing & Midwifery - Trinity ...

School of Nursing & Midwifery, Trinity College Dublin: 8 th Annual Interdisciplinary Research Conference
Transforming Healthcare Through Research, Education & Technology: 7 th – 9 th November 2007
Conference Proceedings
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Children’s Appraisals of Interparental Conflict and Parenting
Maria João Rodrigues, Master Degree, Public Health Nurse,
Nursing Professor
School of Nursing, University of Madeira, Portugal
e-mail: mjbarreira@uma.pt
Background and Context: One of the important ways in witch a
family can affect the development in children is the Emotional
climate of the family. Parents play a major role in determining the
emotional climate within the family, through the nature of marital
relations and parenting style. Marital relations characterized by
conflict and anger create a negative emotional climate that can lead
to more emotional problems for children. Family emotional climate
is also affected by the attitudes and behaviours of parents as they
respond to the physical and emotional needs of their children.
Children who are emotionally well-adjusted with few behavioural
problems are more likely to have experienced a parenting style
characterized by high acceptance, warmth and support, rather than
a hostile, over controlling parenting style.
Parental Style is a set of attitudes, goals and parenting practices
that create an emotional environment through which the parent and
child interact (Darling & Steinberg, 1993).
Acceptance consisted of parenting characterized at the positive pole
by sharing, expression of affection, positive evaluation, and at the
negative pole by ignoring, neglect and rejection.
Psychological Control is characterized by intrusiveness, parental
direction, and control through guilt, with the possessiveness,
protectiveness, nagging, negative evaluation, strictness and
punishment.
The family systems perspective understands psychopathology as a
reflection of family process. According to family systems theory,
interparental conflict is a risk factor for children because parent
child relationship are accompanied by an intensification of either
intimacy, rejection, or both, witch also are accompanied by
symptomatic behaviours in the child. The parent child relationship is
the primary feature of the context, as a risk factor, as a protector
variable in the parental conflict.
The expression “parental conflict” refers to the type and victim, that
is, the child witnesses the violence and/or the conflict between two
next of kim emotionally attached and with whom is shared the
space.
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