Half of all American children will witness the breakup of a parent's marriage. Of these children, close to half will also see the breakup of a parent's second marriage. Although divorce may be the best option for all parties involved, parents fail to realize that divorce is a significantly traumatic event that can alter a child's behavioral pattern. The more conflict involved in a divorce, the more the child is exposed to the overt unhappiness of their relationship. For young, impressionable kids this progress can cause some damaging, long lasting effects. Despite the lack of research, there is a definite correlation between high conflict divorce and behavioral problems in children. Conflict is defined as a state of disharmony between incompatible persons, a battle or war or a clash between individuals. This would mean that a high conflict divorce is when there is an abundance of hostility either from one party or sometimes both during the process of divorce. Children are very impressionable, especially when it comes to their parents behavior. If a child observes their parents dealing with problems using extreme aggression then they are more likely to assume that is the way they should deal with their problems.
There are three main dimensions that need to be considered when assessing incidence and its effect on children: domain, tactics and attitudinal. When conflict has domain dimension this suggests there will be disagreements over a series of divorce issues such as financial support, property division, custody, and access to the children, or to values and methods of child rearing. Tactics dimension of conflict is the way in which the divorcing couple tries to resolve disagreement. This can be handled many ways, for instance, verbal or physical aggression or even just ignoring each other. Tactics dimension also includes the way disputes may be formally disputed with attorney negotiation.