Large Families: Aspects of Interpersonal Communication between Spouses and Strategies for Dealing with Marriage Conflicts

The article presents the results of a study of the characteristics of marital communication among spouses with many children in comparison with those with one child. It was found that in large families, the level of mutual understanding in communication is higher than that of spouses in single-parent families. Conflict competence, understood as the predominant choice of adaptive strategies in marital conflict, is higher in spouses with many children. They have better developed behaviors than one-child spouses aimed at analyzing difficulties, increa­sing self-esteem and self-control, maintaining or quickly restoring emotional intimacy. It is shown that the most common cause of marital conflicts in single-child families are finances, and in large families – child rearing and household arrangements. The three main causes of marital conflicts in both single-parent and large families include "husband/wife attention deficit", which indicates the high importance of the "psychotherapeutic" function of the family, providing emotional support by spouses to each other.