New research suggests interparental conflict can spill over into a mother’s parenting style

A new study published in Developmental Psychology sheds light on how conflict between parents may influence the way they discipline their young children. The findings suggest that for mothers, hostile interactions with their partner are associated with changes in how secure they feel in the relationship, which in turn relates to more harsh and less constructive approaches to discipline. These patterns were not found among fathers, pointing to possible differences in how men and women respond to relationship stress.

Past studies have consistently shown that when parents experience high levels of anger, criticism, and verbal aggression in their relationship, their caregiving can suffer. They may become more controlling, less consistent, or less responsive to their children’s needs. While this pattern is widely accepted, the psychological processes that drive it remain less clear. The current study tested one proposed explanation: that relationship stress undermines a parent’s sense of emotional support from their partner, which can ripple into how they interact with their children.

“We’ve known for decades that hostile interparental conflict, characterized by expressions of anger and/or hostility between parents, is associated with harsh and insensitive discipline practices towards children; however, we have a very limited understanding as to how hostile conflict confers subsequent risk for parenting difficulties,” explained study author Cory Platts, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Missouri, who conducted the research at the University of Rochester.

“In other words, we still have yet to uncover precisely how anger and aggression generated by interparental conflict spills over into the parent-child relationship. Given the importance of romantic relationships in serving as a context for the regulation of negative emotion, my colleagues and I conducted a study to examine whether hostile conflict corrodes the attachment relationship between parents, undermining the ability of parents to rely on one another for emotional support in approaching their caregiving duties.”

To explore this idea, the researchers drew on attachment theory, which focuses on how people manage emotional closeness and support in relationships. When someone feels secure with their romantic partner, they are more likely to cope with stress in healthy ways and to remain emotionally available for others, including their children. However, ongoing conflict may erode this sense of security, leading parents to either withdraw emotionally (attachment avoidance) or become overly worried and reactive (attachment anxiety). The study tested whether these changes in attachment security—both consciously reported and automatically processed—might explain the link between conflict and parenting behavior.

The research team recruited 235 families from a midsize city in the northeastern United States. Each family included a mother, a father, and a child between the ages of two and four. Participants were assessed annually over three years, using a combination of laboratory observations, surveys, and computerized tasks. During their first visit, couples engaged in a structured discussion about topics they frequently disagreed on. Trained observers rated the level of hostility in these interactions, including signs of verbal aggression, negativity, and emotional escalation.

Parents also completed a widely used questionnaire that measures conscious attachment patterns, including avoidance and anxiety in romantic relationships. In addition, they participated in a rapid word-sorting task designed to measure automatic, unconscious associations between their partner and words representing security or insecurity (such as “safe” or “hurtful”). This type of task taps into a level of relational belief that may not be fully available through self-reflection but still guides behavior.

Parenting practices were measured through vignettes describing common child misbehaviors, with parents indicating how likely they were to use power-assertive discipline (such as spanking), permissive discipline (such as ignoring the problem), or inductive discipline (such as explaining consequences).

The researchers then analyzed the data using structural equation modeling, which allowed them to test whether hostile conflict predicted changes in attachment, and whether those changes, in turn, predicted parenting behavior.

Among mothers, the results supported the proposed model. Higher levels of conflict between partners were linked to lower automatic attachment security one year later. This decline in attachment security was then related to an increase in power-assertive discipline the following year. In other words, when mothers experienced more hostility in their relationship, they became less likely to unconsciously associate their partner with support and comfort, and more likely to resort to harsh discipline strategies.

The study also found that mothers who developed greater attachment avoidance over time were less likely to use inductive discipline—an approach that involves calmly reasoning with the child and explaining why their behavior is inappropriate.

“The results of this study suggest that associations between hostile interparental conflict and insensitive discipline practices can be partly explained by decrements in the quality of the interparental attachment relationship,” Platts told PsyPost.

Interestingly, the effects of conflict on parenting through attachment did not hold for fathers. While conflict was related to increases in both attachment anxiety and avoidance for men, these changes were not significantly associated with how fathers disciplined their children. The researchers propose several possible explanations for this pattern. One is that mothers may be more sensitive to relationship stress, particularly in early childhood when they often take on more caregiving responsibilities.

Prior research suggests that women may react more strongly to signs of emotional disruption in close relationships, and that they often serve as the emotional regulators within the family. As a result, their caregiving behavior may be more vulnerable to changes in how they view their partner.

“It was somewhat surprising that romantic attachment did not serve as a spillover mechanism linking hostile interparental conflict and parental discipline for fathers,” Platts said. “It could be that fathers are less involved in discipline during the preschool years, which could mean that fathers may not require the same levels of emotional support in approaching caregiving duties
compared to mothers.”

“For many families (but not all), mothers serve as the primary caregiver tasked with responding to children’s emotional needs and misbehavior. This can be a challenging task for mothers who may rely upon their romantic partner for support in regulating stress in the face of such challenges. But mothers experiencing high levels of hostile conflict with their romantic partner may feel less able and willingly to rely on their partner for support, resulting in the proliferation of negative emotion into the parent-child relationship.”

“However, the attachment relationship may become more important for fathers as children become older,” Platts added. “For example, our team previously demonstrated that the self-reported attachment security promoted more sensitive discipline practices among fathers of school-aged children (Davies et al., 2009), a period in which fathers may be more involved in childrearing duties.”

The distinction between automatic and self-reported measures of attachment also played a meaningful role. The automatic measure—based on rapid word-sorting—was a significant predictor of power-assertive discipline, while self-reported attachment avoidance predicted lower use of inductive discipline.

This suggests that both conscious and unconscious representations of the romantic relationship may contribute to parenting behavior in different ways. The study highlights the value of including automatic assessments in psychological research, as they may uncover processes that are not captured by traditional questionnaires.

“We found different spillover mechanisms as a function of the method with which we used to assess romantic attachment,” Platts explained. “In particular, we found that hostile conflict was associated with higher levels of self-reported romantic attachment avoidance, reflecting parents’ reported feelings of discomfort relying on their romantic partner in times of need. In turn, higher levels of attachment avoidance were associated with lower levels of inductive discipline among mothers the following year. This finding aligns with the literature which has typically found that mothers unable to rely on their partner for support in times of need are less likely to provide such support to their children.

“Moreover, we also examined parents’ implicit, or unconscious appraisals of the romantic attachment relationship via a computer- based procedure (i.e., Go/No-Go Association Task) that assessed the accuracy with which parents could pair their partners name with words indicative of a secure attachment relationship (e.g., comforting) in a fast-paced word sorting task. We found that hostile conflict was associated with decreases in implicit attachment security (i.e., less accuracy pairing their partner’s name with secure attachment words) in mothers over a one-year period.

“In turn, lower levels of implicit attachment security were associated with higher levels of power- assertive discipline (i.e., spanking) one year later,” Platts said. “Relational distress at
the implicit level may bias how mothers perceive and interpret children’s transgression, resulting in greater reactivity to children’s perceived transgression. Alternatively, it could also be that unmet attachment needs in the romantic relationship result in displaced anger directed towards the child. Given that this is the first study to examine the relation between implicit attachment security and parenting behavior, these interpretations are somewhat speculative until future work can uncover how these processes might operate.”

The researchers noted some limitations of the study. One is that discipline was assessed through self-report, which may not fully reflect actual behavior in everyday parenting situations. Future research could incorporate direct observations of parent-child interactions to build on these findings.

Another limitation concerns the automatic attachment measure, which showed low stability over time, especially for fathers. It remains unclear whether this instability reflects changes in the attachment system or measurement limitations. The sample also lacked diversity in terms of socioeconomic background and cultural representation, which may affect how broadly the findings can be applied.

Despite these limitations, the study offers new insight into how romantic relationships and parenting are connected over time. The findings suggest that for mothers of young children, the quality of the romantic relationship can shape their parenting, not only through conscious thoughts and emotions but also through subtle, automatic associations with their partner. When mothers experience conflict that erodes their sense of emotional security, they may respond by becoming more reactive and less likely to use constructive discipline strategies.

“Moving forward, it will be important to uncover the spillover mechanisms that transmit distress from the interparental to the parent-child relationship for fathers,” Platts told PsyPost. “It has been more challenging to identify the determinants of fathers; parenting relative to mothers, so it is essential that we continue to refine theories of fathering to better understand the factors influential in shaping fathers’ parenting behavior towards young children in the context of high levels of interparental conflict.”

The study, “Hostile Interparental Conflict and Parental Discipline: Romantic Attachment as a Spillover Mechanism,” was authored by Cory R. Platts, Melissa L. Sturge-Apple, and Patrick T. Davies.