Innovations in Research on Conflict, Families, and Children

• Date: 01 April 2018
• Author: E. Mark Cummings,Kathleen N. Bergman
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/fcre.12334
• Published date: 01 April 2018

SPECIAL ISSUE EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

INNOVATIONS IN RESEARCH ON CONFLICT, FAMILIES, AND

CHILDREN

Kathleen N. Bergman and E. Mark Cummings

A key issue for the family and conciliation court community is how conflict affects children and

families (Emery, 1982). Considerations of the impact of conflict, however, are more nuanced than

simply assessing the level of conflict in the family. It is increasingly recognized that conflict can be

constructive or destructive, and the degrees to which conflicts are resolved are especially important

to child and family outcomes (Cummings & Davies, 1994). Moreover, children’s emotional security

in response to marital, family, or community conflict has been repeatedly demonstrated as being

closely related to child outcomes (Cummings & Davies, 2010). Furthermore, conflict in the broader

social context (e.g., political violence and armed conflict) may both affect family conflict and directly

impact children’s well-being (Cummings, Merrilees, Taylor, & Mondi, 2017). Finally, with regard to

applied and clinical perspectives, emphasis is increasingly being placed on the translation of research

findings into program contents (Grych, 2005).

The articles in this Special Issue touch on all of these themes and, additionally, outline multiple

innovative directions toward even more nuanced understanding of conflict, families, and children’s

development. Reflecting a call for greater integration of related constructs across currently distinct lit-

eratures, Kopystynska and Beck provide important and timely insights into the many similarities

(and some differences) in streams of scholarship associated with naming conventions of “destructive

interparental conflict” and “intimate partner abuse (IPA).” Concerning implications for legal and aca-

demic scholars, they encourage professionals across these academic traditions to engage in greater

consideration and referencing of the others’ methodologies and terminologies and call attention to

the potential ramifications of ignoring differences in naming conventions.

Ha, Bergman, Davies, and Cummings provide an innovative analysis of how parental post conflict

explanations may affect child adjustment outcomes. Four types of post conflict explanations are iden-

tified, including Dismissive, Emotion Dysregulation, Constructive and Blaming, with all having vari-

ous and differential implications for children’s responses. In the tradition of Emotional Security

Theory (EST; Davies & Cummings, 1994) and consistent with the increasing emphasis on the impor-

tance of understanding the processes that mediate the effects of conflict and violence on children,

Bergman, Choe, Cummings and Davies demonstrate that the impact of marital conflict on adoles-

cents’ adjustment problems is mediated by their emotional insecurity. Reflecting innovative contribu-

tions to the burgeoning literature on emotional insecurity as an explanatory process for the impact of

conflict on children, they show that emotional insecurity is related to adolescents’ adjustment at

home and in school and that emotional insecurity about the family system was even more closely

related to adolescent school adjustment than emotional security about the interparental relationship.

Extending consideration of emotional insecurity as an explanatory process for the impact of conflict

to contexts of armed conflict and political violence, Merrilees and Lee examine how children’s emo-

tional insecurity may have lasting effects on adjustment, even after the end of the conflict.

The second part of this Special Issue focuses on clinical perspectives and translational research on

interventions for destructive conflict and includes articles with direct implications for practice in fam-

ily and conciliation courts. Rowen and Emery take on the common wisdom that parental denigration

only leads to parental alienation for the parent who is the subject of the denigration. Based on two

FAMILY COURT REVIEW, Vol. 56 No. 2, April 2018 207–208

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C2018 Association of Family and Conciliation Courts