Lecture
Interestingly, attention to the child - to his needs, development, upbringing, and individual characteristics - which is now customary for us, is a relatively new phenomenon in human culture.
1. Historians describe several stages on the path to modern parenthood: the Infanticidal style (from antiquity to the 4th century A.D.): characterized by mass infanticide and violence. Infanticide came to be regarded as murder only in 374 A.D.
2. The Abandonment style (4th century - 13th century): the child remains an object of aggression and is often gotten rid of by being sent to a monastery, a wet nurse, or another family.
3. The Ambivalent style (14th century - 17th century): the child is not yet a separate person and a full-fledged member of the family; he is denied independence and individuality.
4. The Intrusive style (18th century): the child becomes closer to the parents, but his behavior and inner world are strictly controlled. The child is still seen as «not yet fully grown up».
5. The Socializing style (19th century - first half of the 20th century): the child is an object of upbringing and instruction, and the parents' main efforts are directed at training the will and preparing the child for independent life. In psychology at this time, the idea takes root that all the characteristics of adult life come from childhood.
6. The Helping style (from the mid-20th century to the present): parents strive to ensure the individual development of the child, and emotional contact and empathy predominate. By the 1980s, child-centered tendencies had even placed the child at the head of the family and «made» parents into something like the culprits behind all possible problems in a child's development (this refers to tendencies in psychological research). Fortunately, this child-centered extremism rather quickly began to decline, and psychologists came to see the psychological (as opposed to role-based) equality of family members. In practice, this manifested itself in the fact that they stopped unequivocally identifying with the child «tormented by parents» and, consequently, gained the opportunity for a more objective understanding of the situation and respect for the feelings and interests of both sides (children and parents).
What is even more interesting is that the described stages of the historical development of parenthood, under different life circumstances and in different types of families, can come alive again, manifesting themselves in what psychologists call styles of child-parent relations: rejecting, permissive, authoritarian, democratic, and symbiotic styles.
In 20th-century psychology there are several of the greatest discoveries, which have become axioms:
* personality is the result of relationships. The entire distinctiveness of a personality is determined by the specific nature of the situation in which it develops, and by the entire set of relationships it enters into;
* both child-parent relations and family relations exist;
* many problems in the development of the child and the adult are resolved in the process of establishing child-parent and family relations.
It is precisely these postulates that underlie the work of family psychologists, and not only family psychologists.
Comments