The health and quality of the marital relationship are important aspects of the family to consider as environments for child development. Associations between the quality of the marital relationship and child development outcomes have long been demonstrated. This chapter presents the definition of marital health, and focuses on explicating the components of marital health, including distinctions between destructive and constructive interparental conflict from the children's perspective. It reviews the findings concerning pathways of the effects of marital health on children, including influences following from exposure to marital functioning (i.e., direct effects), and changes in family functioning, illustrated by parenting, linked with qualities of marital functioning (i.e., indirect effects). The chapter examines additional interrelated family contexts associated with marital health, including parental psychological adjustment, and divorced and divided families as well as blended families. Finally, it presents future directions for understanding marital health as a developmental context for child development.

This chapter argues that the treatment of the environment as a separable entity from systems of interest is not consistent with a dynamic systems (DS) perspective. Instead, the environment is a macrolevel within a system's organization. The chapter presents the definition of the system and shows how that definition reflects the researcher's or theorist's choice of the level of analysis. Incorporating analyses real-time and developmental-time scales, even without adopting a systems view, is perhaps the most daunting endeavor of developmental research. The chapter describes one such methodology, the state space grid (SSG) technique, as it intuitively illustrates the relations between structural and temporal aspects of system dynamics. It reviews various SSG studies that reveal critical aspects of system dynamics and structure. Finally, the chapter discusses the implications of the DS approach for the study of environmental contexts.