family relationship

1. Family
Relationships

2.  Families form a system of interacting
elements
 Parents and children influence one
another
 Parents influence their children both directly and
indirectly
 Children influence their parents
◦ Children’s behaviors, attitudes, and interests affect how
their parents behave toward them
The Family

3. In the systems view, families,
parents and children influence
each other and parent-child
relations are influenced by other
individuals and institutions

4. Culture
School
Work
Extended
Family
Neighborhood
Family
Father Mother
Children
Religious
Organizations

5.  Survival of offspring
◦ Families help to ensure that children survive to
maturity by attending to their physical needs, health
needs, and safety
 Economic function
◦ Families provide the means for children to acquire the
skills and other resources they need to be
economically productive in adulthood
 Cultural training
◦ Families teach children the basic values in their
culture
Function of Families

6.  Parents as direct instructors
◦ Parents may directly teach their children skills, rules, and
strategies and explicitly inform or advise them on various
issues
 Parents as indirect socializers
◦ Parents provide indirect socialization in the course of their
day-to-day interactions with their children
 Parents as providers and controllers of opportunities
◦ Parents manage children’s experiences and social lives,
including their exposure to positive or negative
experiences, their opportunities to play with certain toys
and children, and their exposure to various kinds of
information
Parental Socialization

7.  There are two general dimensions of
parental behavior
 The degree of warmth and responsiveness that
parents show their children
 The amount of control parents exert over their
children
Parenting Dimensions

8.  At one of the spectrum are parents who
are openly warm and affectionate with
their children
 At the other end of the spectrum are
parents who are relatively uninvolved
with their children and sometimes even
hostile toward them
Warmth and Responsiveness

9.  Parents’ efforts to supervise and monitor their
children’s behavior
 Effective control
◦ Setting standards that are appropriate for the child’s
age
◦ Showing the child how to meet the standards
◦ Rewarding the child for complying to these standards
 Parents should enforce the standards consistently
◦ Children and adolescents are more compliant when
parents enforce the rules regularly
 Effective control is also based on good
communication
◦ Parents should explain why they’ve set standards and
why they reward or punish as they do
Parental Control

10. Parental Styles (Baumrind)
 Authoritarian parenting
◦ High parental control with little warmth
 Authoritative parenting
◦ A fair degree of parental control with being
warm and responsive to children
 Indulgent-permissive parenting
◦ Warmth and caring but little parental control
 Indifferent-uninvolved parenting
◦ Neither warmth nor control

11.  Children with authoritarian parents
typically have lower grades in school,
lower self-esteem, and are less skilled
socially
 Children with authoritative parents tend
to have higher grades and be
responsible, self-reliant, and friendly
 Children with indulgent-permissive
parents have lower grades and are often
impulsive and easily frustrated
 Children with indifferent-uninvolved
parents have low self-esteem and are
impulsive, aggressive, and moody

12.  Direct Instruction
◦ Telling a child what to do, when and why
 Learning by Observing (modeling)
◦ Learning what to do by watching
◦ Learning what not to do (counterimitation)
 Feedback
◦ Parents indicate whether a behavior is appropriate
and should continue or should stop
How Can Parents Influence Their
Children?

13.  Reinforcement
◦ Any action that increases the likelihood of the
response that it follows
 Punishment
◦ Any action that discourages the reoccurrence
of the response that it follows
Feedback

14.  Parents often unwittingly reinforce the very
behaviors they want to discourage
◦ First step: The mother tells her son to do
something he doesn’t want to do
◦ Second step: The son responds with some
behavior that most parents find intolerable
◦ Third step: The mother gives in – tells the son
he doesn’t need to do as he was initially told as
long as he stops doing the behavior that is so
intolerable
Negative Reinforcement Trap

15.  Administered directly after the undesired
behavior occurs, rather than hours later
 An undesired behavior always leads to
punishment, rather than usually or
occasionally
 Accompanied by an explanation of why the
child was punished and how punishment
can be avoided in the future
 The child has a warm, affectionate
relationship with the person administering
the punishment
Punishment Works Best When:

16. Drawbacks to punishment
Punishment is primarily suppressive: if a
new behavior isn’t learned to replace it,
the old response will come back.
Punishment can have undesirable side
effects:
◦ Children become upset as they are being
punished which makes it unlikely that they
will understand the feedback that punishment
is meant to convey.
◦ When children are punished physically – they
often imitate this behavior with peers and
younger siblings.

17. Children who are spanked
often use aggression to
resolve their disputes with
others and are more likely to
have behavior problems

18. Parenting behavior and styles evolve as a
consequence of the child’s behavior.
Children’s behavior helps determine how
parents treat them and the resulting parental
behavior influences children’s behavior,
which can in turn cause parents to again
change their behavior.

19. This reciprocal influence lead many
families to adopt routine ways of
interacting with each other.
Some families end up running smoothly
(parents and children cooperate, anticipate
each other’s needs, and are generally
happy).
Some families end up in trouble
(disagreements are common, parents spend
much time trying to unsuccessfully control
their defiant children, and everyone is often
angry and upset).

20.  Parental warmth gradually changes as
children develop
◦ Hugs and kisses work with toddlers not with
adolescents
 Parental control gradually changes as
children develop
◦ Parents gradually relinquish control and
expect children to be responsible for
themselves
Children’s Influence

21. Attractiveness
 Mothers of very attractive infants are more
affectionate and playful with their infants
than are mother of infants with
unappealing faces
 Why?
◦ An evolutionary explanation would propose that
parents are motivated to invest more time and
energy into offspring who are healthy and
genetically fit and therefore likely to survive
 Attractiveness could be seen as an
indicator of these characteristics

22. Marriage and
Divorce

23.  Nearly half of all first marriages end in
divorce
◦ Every year approximately one million
American children have parents who divorce
 Divorce is distressing for children
because it involves conflict between
parents and usually separation from one
of them
Divorce

24. Family Life After Divorce
Children usually live with their mothers
◦ About 15% of children live with their fathers after
divorce
How does life change (based on the Virginia
Longitudinal Study)?
◦ First few months after divorce, many mothers are
less affectionate toward their children
◦ Two years after the divorce, mother-child
relationships improve, particularly for daughters
◦ Six years after the divorce, children in the study
were adolescents
 Family life continued to improve for mothers and
daughters
 Family life was problematic for mothers and sons

25. Impact of Divorce on Children
 Children whose parents had divorced
fare poorly compared to children from
intact families in:
◦ School achievement
◦ Conduct
◦ Adjustment
◦ Self-concept
◦ Parent-child relations
 Children adjust to divorce more readily if
their divorced parents cooperate with
each other, especially on disciplinary
matters
◦ Children benefit from joint custody if parents
get along

26. Divorce’s Influence on Development
 The absence of one parent means that
children lose a role model, a source of
parental help and emotional support, and a
supervisor
 Single-parent families experience economic
hardship
◦ Creates stress and often means activities once
taken for granted are no longer available
 Conflict between parents is extremely
distressing to children and adolescents
◦ Particularly for children who are emotionally
insecure

27. Which Children are Affected?
 The overall impact of divorce is about the same for
boys and girls
◦ However, divorce is more harmful when it occurs
during childhood and adolescence than during
preschool or college years
 With regard to parents’ remarriage, young
adolescents appear to be more negatively affected
than younger children
◦ Young adolescents’ struggles with issues of
identity are heightened by the presence of a new
parent who has authority to control them and is a
sexual partner of their biological parent

28. Children and their Peers:
Play

29.  Children’s skills at interacting with peers
improves rapidly
◦ Children are becoming increasingly self-aware,
more effective at communicating, and
better at understanding the thoughts and
feelings of others
Peer Relations

30. What are some benefits of play?
 Play and social development go hand
and hand.
 Play offers many opportunities to be
with other children and to share, take
turns, disagree, and compromise
(Mitchell and Davis, 1992).
 While at play, children are increasing
their self awareness and are becoming
more involved in cooperative play.

31. Benefits of play
 Emotionally, children develop greater
self awareness and they are more able
to predict the emotions of others.
 According to Huffnung (1997) children
will develop empathy or the ability to
appreciate the feeling of others and
understand their point of view.
◦ If one child begins an activity, it is likely that
his friends will want to follow along.

32. Developmental Sequence of
Cognitive Play
Play Category Description Examples
Functional
Play
Simple, repetitive
motor movements with
or without objects.
Especially common
during the first 2 years
of life.
Running around a
room, rolling a car back
and forth, kneading
clay with no intent to
make something
Constructive
Play
Creating or constructing
something. Especially
common between 3 and
6 years.
Making a house out of
toy blocks, drawing a
picture, putting
together a puzzle
Pretend Play
Acting out everyday
and imaginary roles.
Especially common
between 2 and 6 years.
Playing house, school,
or police officer; Acting
out storybook or
television characters

33. Parten's Five Types of Play
 Mildred Parten (1932) was one of the
early researchers studying children at
play. She focused on the social
interactions between children during
play activities.
 Recent research suggests that children
do not necessarily spend more time in
social types of play as they get older,
but rather their play within each
category becomes more cognitively
mature (Berk, 2004)

34. Parten's Five Types of Play
 Onlooker behavior
◦ Playing passively by watching or
conversing (or asking questions) with
other children engaged in play activities.
 These children seem to move closer to
a group rather than watching whatever
momentarily catches their attention.

35. All by myself play…
 Solitary independent -
Playing by oneself.
◦ A child plays alone with objects.
 Even if the child is within
speaking distance of others,
the child does not alter her
or his play or interact with
others.

36.  Some forms of solitary play are signs that
children are uneasy interacting with others
◦ Wandering aimlessly
 A child that goes from one preschool activity to the
next, as if trying to decide what to do
 They just keep wandering, never settling into play
with others or into constructive solitary play
◦ Hovering
 A child stand nearby peers who are playing, watching
them play but not participating
Solitary Play – Good or Bad?

37. Parallel Play
 Playing, even in the middle of a
group, while remaining engrossed
in one's own activity.
◦ Children playing parallel to each
other sometimes use each other's
toys, but always maintain their
independence.
◦ “He plays beside rather than with
the other children" (Parten,
1932).

38. Associative Play
 When children share materials
and talk to each other, but do
not coordinate play objectives
or interests.
◦ All the children in the group are doing
similar activities, but specific roles and
goals are not defined.

39. A Group Effort
 Example: When several children make sand
castles at the beach, they may share the job
of making walls and digging the moats, and
perhaps consult with one another about
digging a channel to these.
 BUT…as members of the group lose interest
and wander off, others may joining the
activity.

40. Cooperative play
 This type of play occurs when children
organize themselves into roles with
specific goals in mind
◦ They help each other accomplish a joint
venture, such as selling lemonade or building
a fort for their “club”
 Think back…What are some examples of
YOUR cooperative play?

41. Cooperative Play
Example: while playing hospital
they assign the roles of doctor,
nurse, and patient.
Each member of the group
remains with the task until it is
finished or the group decides
together to go on to other
activities.

42. The progression from solitary to parallel
to associative to cooperative play reflects
the child's growing ability to sustain his
interests and relate to other children.

43. Typical 1 ½-year-old Typical 4-year-old
Parallel Play Associative Play Cooperative Play

44. Sociodramatic Play
 As children develop the ability to represent
experiences symbolically, pretend play
becomes a prominent activity.
◦ Pretend play is when children act out various
roles and themes in stories that they create
themselves.
 By the age of four or five, children's ideas
about the social world initiate most
pretend play.

45. Sociodramatic Play
Actions in play often reflect real world
behavior, they also incorporate children's
interpretations and wishes.
Through dramatic play, children learn to
assert themselves in a way to build their
competence in later adult roles (Elkind,
1981).
◦ Children explore and rehearse social roles they
have observed in society
◦ A child learns basic life skills such as cooperation,
negotiation and compromise through play.

46. Is there any value to
sociodramatic play?
 When children play dress-up they are
taking on the role of someone else. By
doing this, children must try to think
and behave in a manner appropriate to
their pretend persona.
 Such Sociodramatic play also helps
them to understand others and develop
feelings of empathy.

47. Thanks for your
great patience!!!