The Implications of Conflict: Considerations for Policy and Practice

• Published date: 01 April 2018
• Date: 01 April 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/fcre.12341
• Author: Kathleen N. Bergman,E. Mark Cummings

FINAL WORD

THE IMPLICATIONS OF CONFLICT: CONSIDERATIONS FOR

POLICY AND PRACTICE

Kathleen N. Bergman and E. Mark Cummings

Policy and practice in the family and conciliation court community is optimally informed by

basic and translational research on conflict, families, and children. Building on a burgeoning lit-

erature in this area that is increasingly directed toward understanding processes and contexts

pertinent to the impact of conflict on children and families (Cummings & Davies, 2010;

Cummings, Merrilees, Taylor, & Mondi, 2017), the articles included in this Special Issue make

important new inroads toward increased understanding of how and why, and for whom and

when, conflict impacts children and families. These reports highlight the importance of moving

beyond naming conventions toward greater integration of relevant findings across multiple

streams of scholarship and the need for consistency, clarity, and cooperation across disciplines

that focus on related constructs and processes. Extending a rapidly increasing literature on emo-

tional insecurity as a process mediating child adjustment outcomes (Cummings & Miller-Graff,

2015), they furthermore call attention to the significance of postconflict explanations for the ulti-

mate impact of interparental conflicts on children and to the particular importance of adoles-

cents’ emotional insecurity about the family to their adjustment in school and adolescent’s

emotional insecurity about family and community to their adjustment in contexts of armed con-

flict and political violence.

The articles in this Special Issue also have relatively direct implications for policy and practice.

The findings presented indicate that parental denigration does not lead to parental alienation for the

parent who is the subject of denigration (i.e., the parental alienation hypothesis) but rather parental

denigration distances children from both parents, especially the one who denigrates the other more

often (i.e., the conflict perspective). These findings, in particular, may be expected to influence new

thinking about policy and practice in the family and conciliation court community. Finally, there is

increasing advocacy in the mental health community for translational research, that is, research that

capitalizes on basic research in the development and testing of prevention and intervention programs.

A final article in this Special Issue provides an example of the application of translational research

notions to the development and testing of a prevention program to reduce destructive conflict in com-

munity families.

This Special Issue thus serves to call attention to the pertinence of research on conflict, fami-

lies, and children to the family and conciliation court community. We hope the work presented

here will act as an invitation to the further careful consideration and application of these lines

of research to the development of future policy and practice. Several themes emerged that were

consistent across the articles included in this Special Issue. A particularly salient message is the

weighty impact, both positive and negative, of interparental and family conflict on youth’s

development; while the quality, content, and resolution of conflict have repercussions that

extend to contexts well beyond the family, emotional security, even in adverse circumstances,

remains an important protective mechanism. Taken together, the contents of this Special Issue

also highlight the profound need for continued efforts toward developing and implementing

FAMILY COURT REVIEW, Vol. 56 No. 2, April 2018 281–282

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C2018 Association of Family and Conciliation Courts