Kovács Szabolcs – Bíró Ágota. Conflict Management as Emotional Inheritance

Abstract: This study examines how family conflict-management styles, educational attitudes and emotional reaction patterns are transmitted across generations and how they appear in the inner world of primary school children. The empirical material consists of a qualitative, small-sample exploratory study conducted in a Hungarian-speaking rural community. Six third and fourth-grade children, aged nine to eleven, and their parents participated in the research. The adult participants took part in semi-structured interviews focusing on grandparents’ marriages, childhood family experiences, current couple dynamics, conflict resolution, educational attitudes and religiosity. The children completed three drawing tasks: a family floor plan, an enchanted family drawing in
which family members were represented as animals, and a drawing of their relationship to God. The analysis shows that family cohesion, care, work ethic and the joy of being together function as positive transgenerational patterns. At the same time, unresolved family tensions – alcohol misuse, divorce, silence, fear, harsh communication and rigid paternal authority – may reappear as emotional reflexes even when parents consciously try to break with the past. The child drawings add an important perspective: fathers are frequently represented as strong animals such as tiger, whale or lion. In supportive family contexts this symbolizes protection; in more burdened contexts it also carries elements of fear, threat or defensive positioning. The study argues that  transgenerational transmission is not a linear repetition of the past but a dynamic process in which continuity, counter-patterns, compensation and residual emotional traces coexist. The findings have pedagogical and pastoral relevance, because children’s aggression, withdrawal or heightened sensitivity may often be better understood as relational signals embedded in a family history rather than as isolated behavioural problems.

Keywords: transgenerational patterns; family systems; conflict management; child drawings; aggression; religiosity; primary school children.