Does a bad marriage really affect your child?

Though arguing in front of your child is certainly not warranted, his behaviour could be adversely affected because of his gene.

Your child report card has knocked the wind out of you. As you stare at it, words like ‘bullying behaviour’, ‘low tolerance’, ‘unaccountably aggressive’ jump out of it and hit you in the face. Surely, your lil cherub isn’t capable of behaviour that’ll warrant such comments? And even if he has slipped, it’s just a temporary phase, caused due to the various fights he witness between you and your spouse. That- you convince yourself- is the culprit. After, all reams have been written about how your marital conflicts can cause a host of problems for your children, especially if they are exposed to daily squabbles, physical violence, argumentative behaviour and cold wars. Tome to have some quiet words with the spouse, you mutter to yourself.

While the ‘quiet words’ could be a solution, what you need to open your eyes to is the fact that your screaming matches- no matter how unbecoming they may be- are not the sole culprits for your child becoming a terror in class. Research indicates that parents’ fighting may not be to blame, rather parents who argue a lot may pass on genes for disruptive behaviour to their children. While this condone your street-fighter attitude in front of your impressionable kid, it could assuage the guilt of those who’ve agonized about how their marital discord has pulverized their child’s emotions and behaviour. After all, if your offspring is genetically coded to be a pathological liar, there really may not be much that you can do about it!

Concurs psychiatrist Dr. Harish shetty, “Any pathological behaviour can be in herited and given the right environment, it can flower.” By pathological behaviour here, he means aberrations that include lying, violence, sensation seeking, prone to unstable relationships, selfishness and low frustration tolerance. He agrees that mere exposure to trauma- like slanging matches between parents- isn’t enough to cause behaviour problems in shaped by his in heritance as well as his experiences. Of course children from broken homes are traumatized! But it would be unfair to say that their aberrant conduct is solely caused by it. Their parents can have pathological disorders, the genes for which they may have passed on to the child,” he explains. And that, in turn could well be the reason for the child’s inappropriate demeanour. He adds that when a child’s behaviour starts changing at a particular point of time, then it’s indicative of being trauma induced by parental conflict. “Change the environment, give the child security, safety and love, and the child improves. On the other hand, for children who’ve in herited these traits, the pattern is visible right since childhood,” he states.

Clearly, this could explain why some children who come from whole some and loving families still exhibit disruptive behaviour. No wonder the study states that parents’ genes influenced how often they argued with their spouses and these same genes, when passed on to their children, caused more conduct problems for the letter.

What’s equally important to remember is that very often, children just pick up certain behaviour from their environment. Like school counselor Aarti Prasad says, “Children can imitate experiences and also use then to their own advantages at times! With the hype that surrounds relationships and bad marriages these days, very often children assume that they are supposed to be traumatized by a particular behaviour. Through it is a fact that seeing marital bickering can affect a child, an other reality is that if a child is genetically predisposed to aggression, depression, violence selfishness etc, then that part of his behaviour will also come across.”

Whether nature, nurture, or a curious combination of both, children have their as there’s no justification for laying open the Pandora’s box of your bad marriage in front of your child, there’s no reasons for you to berate yourself for his questionable behaviour. After all, it is genetic, the blame, game could go back a few generations, at the very last!