The aim of this study was to conduct a cross-sectional study on husbands and wives who are raising children in order to examine the relationship between discrepancies in couples' attitudes towards gender roles and their level of marital satisfaction. Two hundred and seventy couples were surveyed. They answered a questionnaire about own gender role attitudes and also surmised their partners' gender role attitudes in the same way. The principal findings were as follows:

1. The level of marital satisfaction diminished for both husband and wife from the time their first-born started elementary school; wives had a significantly lower level of satisfaction than husbands.

2. The discrepancy between the self-assessment scores and the partner's scores for their surmised attitudes towards gender roles (intra-self discrepancy) was approximately the same as that between a husband and a wife when their first born child was pre-kindergarten age. However, intra-self discrepancy gradually increased for wives. In contrast, the discrepancy decreased for husbands.

3. The level of marital satisfaction was significantly correlated with intra-self discrepancy in attitudes towards gender roles.

4. Intra-self discrepancy in attitudes towards gender roles was examined from two perspectives, namely, the size of the discrepancy and the direction of the discrepancy (whether it was traditional or egalitarian). This examination involved the absolute value and the plus/minus rating scale value. Results indicated that wives with an intra-self discrepancy score of 5 or higher and those with a negative score had the lowest level of marital satisfaction.

　　The above results suggested that intra-self discrepancy had a greater impact on the wife's level of marital satisfaction than the discrepancy in her partner’s actual attitudes towards gender roles.

　　Sand play engenders little resistance and can be actively implemented by a therapist. Thus, sand play was introduced as a form of intervention from a systems theory perspective to address a child's non-attendance at school.

　　Specifically, mother-child (and father-child) sand play explicitly reveals gaps in communication between participants, and it is extremely useful as an intervention to address conflicts in interpersonal relationships.

　　Play was conducted in 3 stages: a free play stage with the child alone, a parent-child play stage, and then a play stage by the mother concerning the child and vice versa with the therapist intervening. The child had lacked autonomy, but talking with the father through this approach resulted in a change in the mother's response. The child broke out of a vicious cycle of attachment to the mother, the child regained autonomy, and the child began going to school again. However, both parents did not simultaneously participate in sand play, so the protocol was not able to be fully implemented.

　　The aim of the current study was to generate hypotheses regarding communication difficulties for couples struggling with cancer. To that end, this study examined topics that were difficult to discuss for couples struggling with cancer, factors underlying that difficulty, and interrelation between those topics and those factors. For bereaved spouses who lost their partners to cancer, topics that were difficult to discuss were: their opinions on their partner's treatment, their partner's acceptance of his or her illness, their own anxiety, and information on their partner's prognosis. Factors underlying that difficulty were the spouse's difficulty understanding the process of a partner's struggle with cancer, the spouse's inability to fully accept a partner's illness, the family's life stage, the discrepancy between what a spouse thought a partner was thinking and the partner's expressed thoughts, the couple's communication style prior to the diagnosis, and a spouse's access to emotional support. Hypotheses regarding communication difficulties for couples struggling with cancer are shown in Figure 1. Results indicated that discussing a partner's struggle psychologically affects his or her spouse, that there is a discrepancy in a couple's communication, and that a spouse's difficulty understanding the process of a partner's struggle with cancer leads to a cyclical phenomenon whereby the couple has difficulty discussing that struggle. Two potential ways to provide support to spouses of partners struggling with cancer are helpingspouses to understand their partner's struggle and carefully gauging the extent to which a partner and his or her spouse have accepted the partner's illness.