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Fighting for the children

You're a judge in a family court, trying to determine whether the parents' constant bickering is causing psychological damage to the child.

How do you know if the seemingly anxious behaviour of the child is a result of the conflict ridden environment they find themselves in, where parents are unable to provide support for their child because they're so embroiled in their own conflicts? Or could it be something more fundamental – simply that the parents are biologically predisposed to tense exchanges and that their child is, therefore, genetically susceptible to experience anxiety?

The answer to this question has significant implications, not only for understanding how children are affected by everyday household conflict, but what can be done to support children living in households marked by high levels of inter-parental conflict, as is often the case in the context of parental separation and divorce.

Making the right call matters – it will impact on whether, and how, children receive the psychological support they need. It may affect custody decisions. But making the right judgement is made more difficult by the lack of empirical evidence explaining why some children are at distinct risk in high-conflict contexts, while others exhibit little or no long-term psychological problems as a result.

It's a dilemma regularly faced by child and family practitioners, including judges and social workers, as they support children through their parents' conflicts, separation and divorce, says Professor Gordon Harold, who leads Otago's Centre for Research on Children and Families. And it's a pressing enough concern to have attracted a research grant award of $424,000 over two years from UK funder the Nuffield Foundation. In collaboration with colleagues at Cardiff University, Harold is drawing on longitudinal and genetically sensitive data sets in a two-stage project.

"Firstly," he explains, "we need to examine what it is about children's experience of inter-parental conflict that explains why some children evidence greater psychological difficulties than others.

The second part puts the product of this research into the hands of those working with children and families in the form of improved practice guidelines and assessment protocols to better assist those children most at risk from inter-parental conflict and violence."

The funding is a major coup for the recently-established centre, created with the goal of producing research that directly informs policy and improves outcomes for children. As well as examining family influences on children's mental health development, the centre explores how family- and child-focused research can be applied to family law, informs the development and implementation of intervention programmes to help children living in contexts of family risk, and is developing a centre of excellence in applied quantitative methods.

Indeed, methodological challenges have long tormented those seeking to examine how family life influences children. "Isolating genetic from environmental influences on development is difficult for human development researchers. It requires novel research designs that overcome some of the limitations inherent in traditional approaches that purport to examine this conceptually important question."

Harold and colleagues in the UK (Professor Anita Thapar, Cardiff University) and the US (Dr Leslie Leve, Oregon Social Learning Center) are engaged in a series of studies that uniquely allow these effects to be disentangled in the context of human studies in a way that has only previously been possible in animal-based experiments.

In a recent study, using a sample of genetically unrelated parents and children, with children having been adopted at birth, the team has found that very young children (nine to 18 months old) show enduring sleep disturbance – a symptom of anxiety – when their parents bicker frequently.

"Because parents and children are not genetically related, common genetic factors cannot, therefore, account for the association between parental irritability [bickering] and child irritability [sleep disturbance]," concludes Harold. The team examined the alternative hypothesis that children who have difficulty sleeping cause increased bickering between their parents – but confirmed the effect occurs the other way around.

"Using a research design of this type allows us to uniquely identify features of everyday family environments that affect children's long-term health and mental health development," Harold says.

The overall project, explains Harold, is part of a wider move to address the psychological effects of family conflict on children with the same commitment that we respond to physical harm. "If a child experiences physical injury, the child is quite rightly provided with appropriate medical support and protected from further harm, if deemed at risk. What about the psychological impacts of family conflict and trauma on children? How do we identify psychological 'risk' and what supports do we offer children based on the specific needs of an individual child?

"Remedying this deficit in the identification, assessment and provision of support for children at psychological risk in the context of hostile inter-parental relations is the core objective of this research programme."

Harold hopes the centre's research will provide a wake-up call to parents, policy-makers and family court judges alike.

"We can no longer avoid confronting the reality that children are positively and negatively affected by the day-to-day family environments that they experience. We can no longer look to explanations that misdirect attention away from the role of the family environment as a significant influence on children's psychological development.

"Most importantly, we can no longer hide from the evidence that suggests it is not only how parents behave toward their children that influences children's mental health development, but how parents behave toward each other that may hold the key to understanding how children are differentially affected by their experiences of everyday family life."

Funding

• The Nuffield Foundation
• National Institutes for Health (UK)
• Economic and Social Research Council (UK)
• Medical Research Council (UK)