Children who are exposed to domestic violence in the home may have less behavior problems if the couple takes time to help them express and manage their emotions, new study findings show.

“There are things that parents can do to protect children from the negative effects of domestic violence,” study author Dr. Lynn Fainsilber Katz of the University of Washington, in Seattle, told AMN Health.

“When parents are aware about coaching of children’s emotions, children show fewer behavior problems,” she said.

Various researchers have reported that children in domestically violent environments are more likely than their peers to experience anxiety, depression, and a variety of other mental problems. Others have found that children of battered women may have problems expressing or regulating their emotions.

Katz and co-author Bess Windecker-Nelson, also of the University of Washington, studied children living in homes where the violence was less severe - “the kind of day-to-day violence that occurs under the radar, but is still damaging to children,” Katz said in a statement.

One hundred and thirty families - married couples with at least one 4 to 5-year-old child - were included in the study.

Slightly more than a third (36 percent) of the couples reported at least one instance of domestic violence, such as pushing, grabbing, or throwing something at their partner.

In general, the parents involved in the study did not appear to have problems talking with their children about their emotions or helping them manage their emotions, Katz and Windecker-Nelson report.

This “suggests that some families are able to encapsulate the domestic violence and prevent it from impacting how they talk to their children about emotion,” they write.

One explanation for this finding may be that the study participants were not living in a highly abusive environment. If the domestic violence had been more severe, the researchers note, parents may have reported a lower ability to engage in such emotion coaching.

When mothers scored high in emotion coaching - i.e. greatly helping their child manage or express emotions - the domestic violence did not seem to impact children’s behavior. Further, when fathers displayed such skills, children were at lower risk of becoming socially withdrawn, “perhaps because coaching mitigates against children’s impressions of their father as frightening,” the researchers write.

In families where mothers scored low in emotion coaching, however, the domestic violence was associated with more behavior problems in the children.

In other findings, the type of emotion coaching given seemed to depend on whether the coach was the victim or the perpetrator. When fathers were the victims of domestic violence, for example, they were less likely to talk to their child about fear, and the abusive wives were also less likely to talk to their child about fear or anger.

“To the extent that parents have difficulty with their own experience of anger and fear, it may make it difficult for parents to coach these specific emotions,” Katz said.

Even though the negative effects of domestic violence may be reduced with coaching of children’s emotions, “children are still likely to carry emotional scars of being exposed to domestic violence,” Katz said. “But long-term studies are needed to establish exactly what these emotional scars may be,” she added.

SOURCE: Journal of Family Psychology, as yet unpublished.