Family Conflictlarge— both on emotional health and behavior (though not
academic performance). Separation adds little explanatory
power except in explaining academic performance.
By contrast if we control for mental illness all these ef-
fects are reduced. To be sure of not overclaiming we proceed
from now on to control for mental health and to look at the
effects of family conflict throughout a child’s life.
We can begin with the effects of the parents’ relationship
on the children’s emotional well- being. As Table 13.2 shows,
the main issue here is the extent of family conflict. Once
the amount of family conflict is given, parental separation
is a smaller issue. This is a standard finding in US studies
also.^4 Of course if family conflict is omitted (as it is in many
studies), separation appears to have a bigger effect; but this
is misleading.
The effects on children’s behavior are more serious, and
these effects (as we know) can be carried on into adulthood.
Thus the partial correlation of parental conflict and chil-
dren’s behavior is −0.14, a substantial effect. Again separation
Table 13.1. How family conflict affects children’s outcomes at 16
(standardized) (ALSPAC)Units Emotional Behavioral IntellectualNot controlling for mental health
Effect of conflict SD −0.11 (.02) −0.20 (.02) −0.02 (.01)
Effect of separation 1, 0 −0.01 (.04) −0.01 (.04) −0.07 (.02)
Controlling for mental health
Effect of conflict SD −0.04 (.02) −0.14 (.02) −0.01 (.01)
Effect of separation 1, 0 0.01 (.04) 0.00 (.04) −0.07 (.02)