Giving Compass' Take:

• Gordon Harold explains how parents' behavior, especially arguing, can have a significant impact on a child's trajectory and mental health. 

• How can funders help parents access the resources they need to maintain healthy relationships? How can schools help students cope with trauma at home?

• Early childhood trauma also affects a child's educational path.

What happens at home really does affect children's long-term mental health and development. But it is not only the relationship between the parent and child that is important. How parents get on with each other also plays a big role in a child's wellbeing, with the potential to affect everything from mental health to academic success and future relationships.

UK and international research conducted over several decades through observations in the home, long-term follow up work and experimental studies, suggests that from as young as six months, children exposed to conflict may have increased heart rates and stress hormone responses.

Infants, children and adolescents can show signs of disrupted early brain development, sleep disturbance, anxiety, depression, conduct disorder and other serious problems as a result of living with severe or chronic inter-parental conflict.

The home environment and the "nurture" they receive there can also be very significant. Increasingly, it is thought that underlying genetic risks for poor mental health can be made worse - or better - by family life.

What does all of this mean for parents?

First, it is important to recognize that it is perfectly normal for parents and carers to argue or disagree with each other. However, when parents engage in conflicts with each other that are frequent, intense and not resolved, children do less well. Even more so if the row is about children, for example where children blame themselves or feel at fault for the arguments.

Research suggests that boys and girls may also respond differently, with girls at greater risk of emotional problems, and boys at greater risk of behavioral problems.

Often, policies aimed at improving mental health among the young have focussed on supporting the children themselves, or directly supporting parenting.

Read the full article about parents arguments by Gordon Harold at BBC.