In these two studies, the authors used children's perceptions of family relationships to examine simultaneously direct and indirect links between marital conflict and child adjustment. With data pertaining to 146 sixth and seventh graders, Study 1 supported direct and indirect effects of perceptions of marital conflict on internalizing behaviors, and indirect effects for externalizing behaviors. In Study 2, data analyzed from 451 families showed indirect effects of marital conflict and

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... child hostility, through adolescent perceptions of such behavior, on both current distress and distress 12 months later in 3 of 4 models estimated. Direct and indirect effects were found for boys' concurrent internalizing behavior. Implications and limitations of both studies are discussed to address the need for a more sophisticated theoretical approach to examine why an association exists between marital conflict and child adjustment. Marital discord has been associated with a number of indexes of child and adolescent maladjustment, including increased de-The mechanisms hypothesized to give rise to this association can be divided into those involving direct effects of marital conflict on child adjustment and those involving indirect effects that are mediated by changes in parent-child relations. Differing views on the mechanisms that account for the marital conflict-child adjustment link are understandable given the paucity of systematic research on this topic, particularly of studies that examine simultaneously more than one mechanism. Two