Children who are exposed to domestic violence tend to exhibit a number of psychological problems, from depression to fearfulness to anxiety to the inability to trust. The effect of domestic violence tends to be similar to that (on children) of living with an alcoholic parent. Domestic violence prevents children from forming relationships of trust. It also like alcoholism tends to spill over from one generation to the next.
As Jaffee etal. (2002) notes, the effects of domestic violence on children might be genetic (given that children in most cases share genes with their parents). However, their research found that the psychological problems that they found in children in homes in which there were domestic violence arose not from a genetic predisposition to such problems but because of the environmental influences of being around violence:
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