Family conflict communication is of great importance to academics, practitioners, Iaypeople, and everyone who has a family.
Family relationships are among the most important, most intimate, and most enduring interpersonal relationships that people have in their lives. Because most persons’ overall life experience and satisfaction depends to a significant extent on the quality of their interpersonal relationships, the quality of family relationships has great impact on the overall quality of life for most people (Diener & Diener, 2009).
Also, families are children’s primary socialization agents (Noller, 1995). As a consequence, the quality of parent-child communication and the communication and relationship skills that children acquire, or fail to acquire, in their families of origin will affect the well-being of children (Steinberg, 2001) and the quality of their interpersonal relationships throughout their lifetime. Finally, unlike most other interpersonal relationships that are essentially voluntary and afford persons the choice of whether to continue or to end the relationship, family relationships are largely involuntary and family members often continue to communicate and interact with one another even when they are very dissatisfied with their relationships. This is particularly true for relationships between parents and children, which makes children especially vulnerable to harmful or abusive behaviors. Society therefore has a legitimate interest in learning about such behaviors and in protecting children from such negative influences.Although all family communication is important, how families communicate during conflict is of particular relevance. In marriages, couples that manage interpersonal conflict well in their relationships report greater relationship satisfaction, more love and respect for their partners, and greater commitment to their partners (Gottman, 1991, 1994). Similar findings are reported for family conflict. Families that manage their conflicts well have more satisfied parents and children, and children perform better in school and in peer relationships (Sillars, Canary, & Tafoya, 2004). Thus, family conflict is an important determinant of relationship quality and quality of life of family members.
In addition, the conflict communication behaviors acquired in families are among the most important behaviors learned that affect children’s subsequent interpersonal relationships (Koerner & Fitzpatrick, 1997, 2002c), further highlighting the importance of family conflict. Finally, behaviors that emotionally and physically harm family members are more likely to occur during family conflict than during any other time of family communication (Straus & Gelles, 1990).Reflecting the breadth of the phenomenon, research on family conflict is not easily reviewed and summarized, in part, owing to inconsistent definitions and conceptualizations of family conflict communication. Nonetheless, in this chapter, I briefly discuss how family conflict has been defined and conceptualized and review some of the more consistent findings that broadly describe the phenomenon of family conflict communication and its outcomes. Then, I review some of the properties of family relationships that distinguish family conflict communication from other interpersonal conflict communication and discuss how future research might address these issues. Because another chapter in this handbook specifically addresses conflict in marital and similar adult romantic relationships (Caughlin, Vangelisti, & Mikucki-Enyart, this volume), the focus of this chapter will be primarily on parent-child conflict. The relative absence of marital conflict in this chapter, however, should in no way be interpreted to suggest that marital conflict does not matter to families.