Perception of the Parent-Child Relationship and Its Relation to Child Adjustment

Abstract

One of the basic tenets of developmental psychology is the thesis that the early familial environment of the child, especially the pervading parental attitude or emotional tone of the parent-child relationship, is a fundamental factor influencing the development of personality. Clinical data offer strong support to the theory of a correlation between parent-child relationships and the nature of children's personality or relative adjustment (7, 8, 9, 14)Much research has been effected for the purpose of isolating the particular attitudes which affect the child (3, 5, 6, 15) and the qualities of personality that are the result of the specific attitudes determined (io). Often, however, this research has been inadequate or contradictory, leaving a confused picture of the relationships involved. A review of the research offers a few explanations for the meagerness of results on this problem: Ausubel's study (i) suggests that the essential relation is that which exists between the child's perception of his familial environment and his adjustment and not, as has been thought, between expressed parental attitudes and childhood adjustment. Based on evidence in Swanson's study of delinquents (13), it was thought that, rather than use attitudes as good indicators of the nature of the parent-child relationship, it might be more useful to measure the proximity of a given child's relationship to the theoretical ideal relationship. These two possibilities suggested a third: if it is the child's perception of his familial relationships which affects his adjustment, then parental perception of the parent-child relationship may well disagree with the child's perception of the same, and, if so, the former is unlikely to be related to the child's adjustment. On the basis of these suggestions, the following hypotheses were constructed: i. A child's perception of his parent-child relationship is correlated to his adjustment: the well adjusted child will perceive his parent-child relationship as relatively happy and close to the theoretical ideal, whereas the maladjusted child's perception of his relationship will be far from ideal.