Triangulation and child adjustment after parental divorce

van Dijk, van der Valk, Deković & Branje (2022) published “Triangulation and Child Adjustment After Parental Divorce: Underlying mechanisms and risk factors” in Journal of Family Psychology. 

Parental triangulation is a particular risk to healthy child adjustment after divorce. However, detailed knowledge is lacking on how triangulation predicts child adjustment, and whether some children are more vulnerable to triangulation’s effects. Therefore, the present study used a sample of 135 children (Mage = 11.76) and 130 parents from 77 recently divorced families to identify whether intrapersonal processes (loyalty conflicts, self-blame, and self-esteem) underlie the link between postdivorce triangulation and child adjustment over a period of 2 years. We also explored whether these direct and indirect effects were dependent on children’s environmental sensitivity and empathy. By means of path analysis in MPlus, the mediation analyses indicated that more triangulation was only indirectly associated with a relative increase in children’s internalizing problems, via experiencing more loyalty conflicts and lower self-esteem. Loyalty conflicts also explained the link between triangulation and children’s externalizing problems. Yet, there were no indirect effects via children’s self-blame attributions. Second, moderation analyses revealed that the effect of triangulation was dependent on children’s level of empathy, but not sensitivity. Children scoring high on empathy showed a stronger association between triangulation and child-reported adjustment problems, both directly and indirectly via loyalty conflicts and self-esteem. There were hardly any significant effects for parent-reported child adjustment. Overall, the present study calls for more awareness on the adversity of postdivorce triangulation for children, its working mechanisms, and the factors that make children more vulnerable to its detrimental effects.

It makes sense to me that, when children experience more loyalty conflicts and lower self-esteem, triangulation exacerbates internalizing problems. It is interesting that, in this sample, it is loyalty conflicts that facilitate externalizing problems. The disadvantages of empathy are striking, but make sense. Children with greater empathy are likely to experience greater loyalty conflicts, be more sensitive to the difference between themselves and children from other families, and feel the effects of triangulation. This means that practitioners dealing with children of divorce need to be more aware of triangulation and its adverse impacts.