Family and School Life Mental Health

Persons concerned with education need to remind themselves constantly that the family has had the child under its influence long before the school and continues to have him throughout school experience. It is in the home, very largely, that the stage is first set for learning patterns of human behavior. Practically unanimous agreement exists among psychiatrists and mental hygienists as to the significance of early family life for mental health.

Possibilities for the school, therefore, are definitely limited at the start. The "education" of the child has been under way for a number of years before he comes to school. What education can do for mental health will depend to a considerable extent on what the family and home have already done; also on what the family continues to do while the youngster is in school. Where the public educational provision includes the nursery school, as it should, the school is able to exert its influence at an earlier stage, of course, but the part of the home remains highly significant even then.

In the present discussion no attempt at a thoroughgoing survey of the broad field of parent education will be made. The purpose is rather to suggest, as a fundamentally important factor in mental hygiene education, the limitations placed upon the school by the preschool education of the home; to indicate something of the influence students of personality and mental health assign to the family situation; and to give some notion of the extent to which parent education of today has been directly affected by what is frequently called "the mental hygiene point of view."

Most authorities believe that the influence of the home and family in making or breaking wholesome personality begins very early and persists very late. Studies of babies in the first year, who showed all the marked differences that characterize later personalities--some slow in their reactions, phlegmatic, dull; others quick, amiable, responding with distinct pleasure to the different stimuli, or with clear evidence of discomfort. At the other end of the scale, there have been some noteworthy cases of adjustment of very difficult boys and girls in foster home surroundings long after older adolescence and beyond.

It seems as if the shocks which the individual receives from society are endurable only when he finds a haven, which in our society the family normally offers. Given such a haven, the expressions of his instincts are held within bounds acceptable to society. When this is lacking, the equilibrium of these unstable individuals is all the more readily thrown out of balance.

One of the most important points about parent education today is the extent to which mental hygiene principles have worked their way into its materials and procedures. An incredible amount of exceedingly valuable information about children's behavior has been brought within the reach of present-day parents, especially mothers, and a glance into the more recent study courses and publications used by parent and child study groups is distinctly reassuring.

There is a tendency in some quarters to view with suspicion the efforts of groups of parents to learn something about mental hygiene as applied to themselves and to their children. Probably not a large number of parents are as yet actually helped; possibly, too, a certain number are harmed--the psychiatrists report a few parents getting just enough of the jargon and the general point of view to find "problem" children where these do not exist. On the whole, however, it is doubtful whether in any other educational field mental health principles have penetrated as far and as well as in the modern plans and practices in parent education and education for family life.