(PS8-B34) The Association Between Parental Marital Discord and Adolescent Psychopathology in a United States Probability Sample

Parental relationships are known to have an important influence on children’s long-term psychological health. Exposure to interparental conflict has been strongly associated with children’s internalizing and externalizing symptoms throughout childhood and later life. Less is known about the influence of poor parental relationship adjustment, or marital discord, on offspring’s psychological outcomes throughout the lifespan. Further, the degree to which parental marital discord is associated with clinical levels of psychopathology in adolescence remains unclear. In the present study, we investigated the association between parental marital discord and adolescent psychiatric diagnoses in the National Comorbidity Survey–Adolescent Supplement, a nationally probabilistic sample of 13-17-year-old adolescents and their parents (N = 3984 dyads). We employed a hierarchical framework, consisting of 16 individual disorders and latent dimensions of internalizing and externalizing disorders, as well as a latent dimension of general psychopathology. Logistic regression analyses were conducted with 12-month prevalence of each disorder regressed on parental marital discord, with separate analyses for parents’ and adolescents’ report of parental marital discord. Results indicated that greater parental marital discord was associated with higher levels of general psychopathology and dimensions of internalizing and externalizing disorders. Consistent with previous literature, the correlation between adolescent-reported marital discord and the externalizing factor was significantly greater than correlation with the internalizing factor. Parent-reported marital discord was also more strongly correlated with the externalizing factor than with the internalizing factor Further, several specific disorders were associated with greater marital discord across both parent and adolescent-report, including major depressive disorder/dysthymia, mania/hypomania, ADHD, oppositional defiant disorder, conduct disorder, and alcohol use disorder. This pattern of results suggests that parental marital discord may be an important transdiagnostic risk factor for adolescent’s mental health.  Overall, these results highlight the importance of continued research focused on the influence of parental marital discord on child and adolescent mental health rather than parental conflict alone. Future research addressing how treatment interventions specifically targeting the interparental relationship improve child outcomes will be particularly informative regarding potential causal mechanisms.