
Parental Emotional Availability and Marital Satisfaction
Chapter from the book:
Uslu,
S.
(ed.)
2025.
Academic Research and Evaluations in Educational Sciences.
Synopsis
Emotional availability is an important concept that includes establishing, maintaining and sharing emotional bonds in parent-child interactions. The parent's capacity to perceive, understand and respond to their child's emotional signals is one of the cornerstones of secure attachment. Parental emotional availability is a concept based on the attachment relationships between parents and children. It refers to the parent's capacity to establish and maintain an emotional bond with their child. Emotional availability to parents makes significant contributions to children's emotional, social and cognitive development. Parental emotional availability is affected by various risk factors such as parental psychopathology, divorce and conflicts between parents. Marriage is the first step in the formation of the family, which is the foundation of society. The qualified conduct of the marital relationship means that the family and society are healthy. Marital satisfaction is a multidimensional concept that expresses the level of satisfaction and happiness of individuals in their relationships with their spouses. While factors such as psychological health, communication, attachment styles, sexual harmony and social support shape marital satisfaction, factors such as conflict, infidelity and financial stress lead to negative effects. Factors such as complementary needs and trust play a critical role in determining the dynamics in the marital process. This review article explains emotional availability, parental emotional availability, and marital satisfaction, which is an important concept in the marital relationship, and draws attention to the effects of parent-child relationships and emotional availability to parents on individuals' marital relationships in adulthood. Establishing healthy parent-child relationships in the early period increases trust, commitment, and emotional satisfaction in later periods. In this context, parental emotional availability is not only a concept specific to childhood, but is also considered an important element that shapes the individual's relationships in adulthood.