I Read the Chapter
Karey’s chapter, “Interparental Conflict, Parental Relationship Dissolution, and the Development of Children’s Coping,” (1) profoundly influenced my thinking on how children respond to parental disputes. One of the most striking insights I took away was the idea that, without effective intervention, a child often ends up having to choose between parents. In situations where the two adults can’t stop fighting, the child is forced to protect their own mental health by aligning more strongly with one parent. This heartbreaking reality underscores the importance of finding new approaches to help children develop healthy, adaptive coping strategies when they are caught in the middle of interparental conflict.
We Can Do Better Than That
Inspired by this chapter, I created a chart that connects Interparental Conflict (IPC), Coping, and Gameplay Design. My intention was to examine how the central concepts in research on children’s coping might translate into interactive storytelling and game mechanics. In particular, IPC can be highly context-specific and depends on factors like developmental stage, chronicity, predictability, and the intensity of parental disputes. Environmental elements, such as social context, also play a critical role. Each one of these elements influences the child’s ability to regulate emotions, adapt to adversity, and maintain a sense of stability. From a psychological standpoint, neglect can threaten a child’s need for relatedness, chaos can undermine their need for competence, and coercion can erode their sense of autonomy. Understanding these threats at a granular level allows a designer to craft stories and scenarios that reflect real-life challenges children face.
Children’s coping itself is multifaceted, involving cognitive appraisals, subjective emotions, and regulatory behaviors. These often unfold through a process of primary appraisal—where the child identifies whether there is a threat—secondary appraisal—where the child contemplates possible coping strategies—and a final assessment of whether the chosen approach is working. At the heart of coping lies the fulfillment of basic psychological needs: relatedness, competence, and autonomy. When interparental conflict intensifies and a child feels isolated, incompetent, or controlled, their emotional well-being suffers. Developmental differences also matter. Younger children may have fewer ways to articulate their fears, while older children and adolescents might have a broader repertoire of strategies and more nuanced ways of understanding the conflict around them.
Alongside the “when” and “why” of coping, the “how” proves equally critical. Children learn that coping strategies fall along a spectrum that includes emotion-focused approaches (aimed at managing negative feelings), problem-focused strategies (trying to solve or improve the situation at hand), and combinations of both. These are not neatly separated boxes but overlapping ways of dealing with stress. Over time, a child might use multiple coping strategies—sometimes even simultaneously—to adapt to a recurring situation. Adaptive coping reflects a child’s ability to regulate behavior, emotions, and future planning in ways that reduce threats to basic psychological needs. Yet the idea of adaptiveness grows complicated when long-term goals clash with short-term relief. A strategy that quickly soothes a child’s anxiety might not necessarily build the competence or emotional resilience they need further down the line.
Coping efficacy and flexibility emerge as two key elements that help explain how children navigate these pressures. Efficacy refers to the child’s judgment about whether a coping strategy will work, and it evolves over time. As children acquire new problem-solving and metacognitive skills, they learn to evaluate potential outcomes more accurately. Flexibility has at least two important dimensions. First, there’s the optimistic, can-do attitude that keeps children from feeling completely overwhelmed, even in challenging circumstances. Second, there’s the practical matter of having a large enough “repertoire” of coping strategies to choose from. This repertoire grows as children mature, gain new social supports, and reflect on the successes or failures of past actions. However, no single coping tool addresses all needs at once. Sometimes satisfying one basic psychological need, like autonomy, can inadvertently put relatedness or competence at risk. As such, the art of coping lies in balancing all these needs as circumstances evolve.
Translating these insights into gameplay design presents an exciting opportunity to help children and parents practice healthier ways of responding to conflict. The overarching story and environment in a game can simulate short- and long-term consequences of coping choices. For example, in a narrative scenario where two characters—representing parents—argue, a child character might choose an emotion-focused strategy to keep calm (short-term benefit) but later realize they also need a problem-focused approach to actually resolve issues affecting competence and autonomy. In a game setting, these decisions could trigger chain reactions. Perhaps emotional dysregulation arises from constant parental fighting, leading to anxiety or anger that then affects subsequent story branches. One design mechanic might let the child character identify the most salient need—relatedness, competence, or autonomy—and pick from a set of possible coping strategies. The outcome, or “final appraisal,” then depends on how well that choice aligns with both the child’s developmental tasks and the story’s context.
Appraisals, emotions, and the child’s interpretation of events influence one another in a continuous feedback loop, just as they do in real life. Players could thus experience how controlling the external situation (primary control coping), adapting oneself to the situation (secondary control coping), or stepping away from it (disengagement coping) each shape the child’s emotional landscape and the overall narrative. Over the course of the game, the child character might grow more flexible and more confident, developing a robust “repertoire” of responses. The player’s choices could determine whether the child fosters new skills or remains locked into maladaptive patterns. Different stages of childhood or adolescence, represented in the game’s progression, might also change what needs are most pressing—an older child might be more concerned with autonomy, while a younger one might emphasize relatedness.
From a narrative perspective, this approach has the potential to address the evolving ways children interpret and navigate interparental conflict. As the child character matures, they gain fresh perspectives, expand their support network, and reflect on the effectiveness of previously used strategies. A game can illustrate how the same IPC scenario can feel entirely different to a seven-year-old, a twelve-year-old, and a teenager. Meanwhile, the parental figures might be static or only slowly changing, giving the player a clear picture of how coping strategies have to adapt to outside pressures. The ultimate goal is to help children identify their own coping goals, understand the context in which they’re acting, and improve their situation–strategy fit. When players succeed in setting adaptive, achievable goals that resonate with their personal values, they receive positive feedback, which boosts their sense of coping efficacy.
In the end, the power of this design approach lies in how it bridges research and interactive practice. The knowledge gleaned from Karey’s chapter suggests that children exposed to persistent interparental conflict benefit from interventions that help them articulate and meet their psychological needs, whether it’s relatedness, competence, or autonomy. By presenting these concepts in a game, players can explore coping in a safe environment, experimenting with different strategies and seeing firsthand which ones lead to short-term relief, long-term growth, or, ideally, both. Such an experience might reduce mental health risks and promote healthier conflict resolution. If gameplay reveals that supporting a child’s coping strategies in response to IPC can, indeed, boost overall well-being, the lessons learned could have a much broader impact on families struggling to keep the child from feeling forced to choose one parent over the other.
(1) Skinner, E. A., & Zimmer-Gembeck, M. J. (Eds.). (2023). The Cambridge Handbook of the Development of Coping. Cambridge University Press. Pages: 489 - 509.
