Effect of Intimate Partner Violence on Children

The relationship between mothers and their children is baffling to the eyes of many when dealing with IPV (Intimate Partner Violence). Previous research shows that mothers’ stress results in negative outcomes for their children’s behavior. In this study, we examined how the negative talk (criticism and sarcasm) of mothers who had experienced IPV affects their children’s social skills. Findings were collected and assessed from a sample of eight children aged from 2-6 years old in a domestic violence shelter. Mothers completed the Behavior Assessment System for Children, Second Edition and a trained observer coded mother-child interactions with the Dyadic Parent-Child Interaction Coding System. It was predicted that mothers who had experienced IPV would engage in more negative talk than parents in general community samples and that children who had been in homes with IPV would have poorer social skills than children in the general population normative sample. Furthermore, it was hypothesized that maternal negative talk would be negatively correlated with children’s social skills. Results show that negative talk was non-significantly higher in the mothers exposed to IPV and the social skills of children from homes with IPV were non-significantly lower. The correlation between maternal negative talk and child social skills was not significant either. It could be that mothers were avoiding negative talk because they were being observed. The children in this sample also may have been particularly resilient to the negative effects of IPV and maternal negative talk. However, it is more likely that the lack of significant results are due to the small sample size. Therefore, more research should be done on this topic to determine if the hypothesized results can be found in a larger sample