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Children and Marital Conflict: The Impact of Family Dispute and Resolution. E. Mark Cummings & Patrick Davies. New York: Guilford Press. 1994. 195 pp. Hardcover ISBN 089862-304-9. $40.00 cloth, $16.95 paper.
Cummings and Davies' book is timely, up-todate, thorough, rigorous, and jam-packed with information about the impact of marital conflict on children. The rigor of the work is three-fold: It is well documented, midrange theory-based, and methodologically oriented. It is one of the most helpful books that I, as a family mediator and coparent educator, have encountered.
Looking particularly from the viewpoint of children, the authors meticulously review research on conflict processes within families. They examine the impact of marital conflict on children of each gender and of various ages, including how the effect of interparental discord on the children relates to other dynamics of family functioning. While stressing both the direct and indirect effects of the long-established relationship between marital conflict and children's emotional and behavioral problems, the authors are careful to point out that the majority of children exposed to marital...