The purpose of this paper is to clarify the effect of the parents marital relations on the socialization of the children.
The date for the analysis was collected from the the therapeutic interview with the patients and their parents and the observation of their family behaviors. The sample size was three families who had a child with disordered primary behavior, two families with a child of school phobia, and one family with a child of selective mutism. The sample was restricted to middle class families because the process of socialization varies in different social classes. The frame of work for establishing working hypotheses were constructed through our clinical experiences together with a child psychiatrist, clinical psychologist, and social worker in a child guidance clinic. As for the analytical technique, socialization was defined as processes of internalization of social norms, values, skilles, and customs. A measure of the socialization of the child is whether or not he has clinical problems such as phobic symptoms considered as an index of maladjustment to the society.
Findings derived from the analysis of the date were as follows.
1) The marital relationships of the parents of the children with clinical problems were characterized by hostile equilibrium.
2) There appeared double bind communications in parent-child relationships, which were related to the projection of the parents to the children.
3) Role-transference from the spouses' family of orientation to their own family of procreation and cultural differences in their life style in the premarital stage contributed to the formation of the hostile equilibrium in their marital relationships, and in result led them to the difficulty in establishing marital identity.
4) As far as the family of the children with clinical problems is concerned, the direction of the therapeutic change of the marital-relationships was not all necessarily correlated with that of the change of the symptoms in the children as the therapeutic intervention went on. In other words, there appeared the pathological phenomena in which the children's symptoms were coming to be so much the worse as the disturbance of the marital relationships was coming to be disappeared.
Findings stated above suggested that the study of the socialization of children should be held in the context of the dynamic processes of the family as a whole including the marital relationships as well as the parent-child relationships.
View full abstract