Sliding vs Deciding: Scott Stanley's Blog: They are Watching: Child Wellbeing and Parent Interaction

Monday, April 17, 2017

They are Watching: Child Wellbeing and Parent Interaction

Our lab has a new paper out on how interaction between parents is related to their children’s emotional wellbeing. The official abstract is here. The lead author is Kayla Knopp. She wrote a very clear lay summary of what is a pretty complex paper, so I asked her if I could post it, here.

Kayla Knopp’s Summary

We found that when couples change their specific interaction behaviors (communication and conflict management skills), their children’s wellbeing also tends to change in corresponding ways. On the other hand, we found no evidence that changes in more general marital satisfaction are linked to changes in children’s wellbeing; our findings suggest that children might respond most to the ways that parents interact with each other.

Breaking this down further, we found that improvements in parents’ communication skills were linked to improvements in their children’s emotional wellbeing (what we and others have called internalizing problems), whereas improvements in both communication and conflict management were linked to improvements in children’s behavioral problems (what we and others have called externalizing problems). That is, children seem to respond emotionally to parents’ communication, overall, but respond behaviorally to parents’ conflict. The overarching conclusion is that parents who improve their interactions with their spouse are likely to see similar improvements in their children’s emotional wellbeing and behavior.

A lot of theories suggest that children may be quite sensitive to the way their parents behave toward one another, and our research provides data that support that idea. The take-home from this study is that if we want to improve children’s wellbeing, teaching their parents how to better communicate and manage conflict is probably a great place to start. Now, we can’t say for sure that these changes in parents’ interactions will cause changes in children’s wellbeing; we did not do the kind of study that can establish a causal link. But what we can say is that our research supports efforts to help parents reduce their conflict and improve their communication.

Scott’s Additional Comments

I want to highlight a couple of points Kayla Knopp makes about our new paper. First, children may not be all that sensitive to how happy their parents are together; they are sensitive to how parents treat each other in ways that can be seen. Second, parents help their children by treating each other with respect—by communicating well and managing conflict constructively. For some couples, this is easier said than done.

Knopp, K., Rhoades, G. K., Allen, E. S., Parsons, A., Ritchie, L. L., Markman, H. J., & Stanley, S. M. (2017). Within-and between-family associations of marital functioning and child wellbeing. Journal of Marriage and Family, 79(2), 451 – 461. DOI: 10.1111/jomf.12373

Why Sliding vs. Deciding?

Sliding vs. Deciding is a theme that comes out of my study of commitment and my work with my major colleague in this area, Galena Rhoades, and the work of other scholars on how couples go through important relationship transitions. I believe “sliding vs. deciding” captures something important about how romantic relationships develop. The core idea is that people often slide through important transitions in relationships rather than deciding what they are doing and what it means, especially regarding commitment. An important paper by Wendy Manning and Pamela Smock (2005) was influential in our thinking about how couples transitioned into living together. They conducted a qualitative study of cohabiting couples and found that over one half of couples who are living together didn’t talk about it or make any decision, but simply slid into doing so. Another paper having a large influence on this thinking was written by Jo Lindsey (2000). She found that the cohabiting couples she interviewed could not articulate how they came to be living together. In fact, as she puts it, it seemed like they had no agency in how it happened. Lindsay concluded that the fundamental characteristic of cohabitation was ambiguity, a theme we often discuss. Manning and Smock, Lindsay, and other researchers have noted that, for most couples, moving in together was nothing like a clear decision about what the couple was doing. Thus, it very often is not anything like a how people form a clear commitment. In one of our quantitative studies of cohabitation, we have found that most cohabiters report a process more like sliding into cohabitation than talking about it and making a decision about it.

We believe this sliding vs. deciding dynamic which is quite obvious in how couples come to live together is common in many important relationship transitions, including pregnancy, having children, work, as well as in how couples drift into regular patterns of who does what. In contrast to sliding, commitments that we are most likely to follow through on are based in decisions. In fact, commitment is making a choice to give up other choices. A commitment is a decision. Do we always need to be making a decision about things? I hope not. But when something important in life is at stake, I believe that deciding will trump sliding in how things turn out.

One of the most important implications of the concept of sliding vs. deciding is when this theme is married to our work and thought on the depths of ambiguity in relationship formation these days and our ideas about inertia. What people are often now seeing is that they are sliding through relationship transitions that cause them to increase constraints and lose options before (or without) noticing that they have just entered a more constrained pathway. As a result, we believe that many people are too often giving up options before they have made a choice. That is far from making a choice to give up other choices. That's losing options because one is not noticing an important, or even potentially high cost slide, is not what solid commitment formation is about.

Three theory papers written by me and Galena Rhoades are accessible above at the links: "Sliding vs. Deciding: Inertia and the Premarital Cohabitation Effect", "Commitment: Functions, Formation, and the Securing of Romantic Attachment," and the link labeled "SvD Transition and Risk Model."

Sliding vs Deciding: Scott Stanley's Blog

Monday, April 17, 2017

They are Watching: Child Wellbeing and Parent Interaction

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