Interparental conflict management strategies and parent-adolescent relationships: Disentangling between-person from within-person effects across adolescence

Objective: This study investigates the longitudinal, cross-lagged associations among interparental conflict management strategies and the
parent–adolescent relationship.
Background: The following three main hypotheses explain how interparental conflict affects
parent–adolescent relationship: the spillover,
the compensatory, and the compartmentalization hypotheses. A common key aspect of these
hypotheses is the focus on changes within a family; they hypothesize what happens within
a family when interparental conflict shakes the
family’s equilibrium. Although extant research
supported the spillover hypothesis, this key
aspect was often ignored, and conclusions were
based on comparing families with each other.
This study investigated how interparental conflict is longitudinally associated with the quality
of the parent–child relationship, controlling for
stable between-family differences.
Method: Data consisted of six waves of an
ongoing study with 497 Dutch adolescents
(M =13.03, 43.1% girls), their mothers, and
their fathers. Parents reported on conflict strategies; parents and adolescents reported on
parental support, parent–adolescent negative
interaction, and parental behavioral control.
Random-intercept cross-lagged panel models
were applied.
Results: Most associations were found at
the between-person level: Destructive conflict was related to poor parent–adolescent
relationships. Few within-person associations
were found: Changes in destructive conflict
only were associated positively with changes in
father–adolescent negative interaction.
Conclusions: Associations between interparental conflict and the parent–adolescent relationship are mostly due to stable between-family differences. Intrafamilial fluctuations occur in
conflict and the parent–adolescent relationship, but these changes do not predict each
other