Instant Access To 100,000+ Essays!

A complex balance of psychological forces governed the relationship between parents and children in the failing marriages. We soon learned that the parent-child relationship did not mirror the unhappy marital ties and that the stresses of the marriage did not necessarily spill over into parents' relationships with the children. In fact, it became evident that parenting can remain relatively unencumbered by marital unhappiness or, put more technically, parenting can be maintained as a relatively conflict-free sphere of behavior within a very deprived and unhappy marriage-though, of course, not always. We were interested, in this connection, to discover that men who readily resorted to violence in response to their wives did not necessarily beat, or even spank, their children. Parenting, in fact, could become a means of offsetting marital unhappiness by cultivating a special relationship with one or more of the children. In a significant number of conflict-ridden households the parents were loving and supportive of the children's physical and emotional development. The quality of father-child relationships ranged from good enough to exceptionally good for at least one-fifth of the children. Similarly, the mother-child relationsh