Children's exposure to intimate partner violence: relations between parent-child concordance and children's adjustment

Abstract

The current study examined the extent to which seventy-five 5- to 13-year-old children and their mothers agreed about whether children had been exposed to intimate partner violence (IPV) and the association between parent-child agreement and children's psychological adjustment. One type of disagreement (i.e., parents failed to report IPV exposure that children reported) was associated with children's perceptions of less positive family relationships. Parents of these children, however, reported fewer child adjustment problems than did parents who agreed with their children about children's IPV exposure. The findings suggest the importance of obtaining children's reports of their own exposure to IPV in addition to parental reports. Moreover, parent-child concordance with respect to children's IPV exposure may be an important variable to examine in understanding variations in children's adjustment.