The way your family interacts at home can affect how your kids do in school, a study suggests today in the journal Child Development. Researchers at the University of Rochester in New York and the University of Notre Dame in Notre Dame, Ind., spent three years looking at the relationship patterns in 234 families with 6-year-olds and found a distinct family-school connection, with certain family types predicting problems in school.

Researchers evaluated each family annually, in two visits of two to three hours each. “We have a marital assessment, a parent-child assessment for moms and dads separately, and we have the whole family together,” says lead author Melissa Sturge-Apple, assistant professor of psychology at Rochester. “It gave us a much broader look at the family system per se.”

The team found data that support the theory of three distinct psychological types of families:

Cohesive: Characterized by emotional warmth.

Disengaged: Characterized by cold, controlling and withdrawn relationships.

Enmeshed: Characterized by moderate warmth and emotional involvement, but also hostility and meddling.

Families can be a support to children in the early grades or they can be a source of stress and distraction, Sturge-Apple says.

“This is more evidence that it does matter how members of the family interact with each other,” says L. Alan Sroufe, emeritus professor of child development at the University of Minnesota-Minneapolis, who has read the study.

Researchers said children from families characterized as disengaged had the most problems; they started out in school with higher levels of aggressive and disruptive behavior and more difficulty focusing and cooperating.

The behaviors worsened each year, researchers found.

Children from families described as enmeshed entered school with no more disciplinary problems or depression and withdrawal than their peers from cohesive families, but later began to suffer higher levels of anxiety and feelings of loneliness and alienation.

On average, Sturge-Apple says, those from cohesive families showed fewer problems.

But she says a child’s own resilience and personality can overcome a troubled home environment.

And, the authors say, dysfunctional family relationships aren’t responsible for all school behavior problems; other risk factors include living in high-crime neighborhoods, attending high-poverty schools and associating with troubled peers. USA Today