Parent Education and Mental Hygiene

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. Teachers and school administrators who think of parent education in terms of the earlier activities of parent-teacher groups will find that and with the use of authentic data made available from scientific research at the child development institutes, a significant change has come about. 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 (except the nursery school) 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.

Formerly programs for study [by parents' groups] focused attention exclusively upon the child and included for discussion such topics as obedience, punishment, rewards, curiosity, imagination, habit formation, play, etc. More recently, especially with leaders trained in mental hygiene, interest focuses upon the life of the family groups and upon such items as personality development in family relationships, emotional honesty in dealing with children, etc. In attending such study groups parents are able to learn not only important facts about child growth and the family in a changing world, but also more satisfactory self-direction in their daily relationships with children.

So definitely has mental hygiene entered into modern education for family relations that in nearly all the current definitions mental health as an objective is either explicitly stated or unmistakably implied.

Parent education is a voluntary cooperative effort by parents, studying with qualified leaders (1) to understand more about childgrowth and development, family relationships, the conduct of family life, public education, home-school relationships, and the family in community life; and (2) to grow in ability to take a constructive part in family and community relationships with confidence and satisfaction.

Classification of objectives of parent education reflects clearly, especially in the first three of her list, the recent mental health emphasis in education for family relations:

1. To interpret to parents the findings of specialists in regard to various aspects of child and family life.

2. To modify or change the attitudes of parents toward their children and their behavior.

3. To act as a therapeutic device for relieving personal maladjustment.

With the increased knowledge available about human nature and the ways in which it develops and is modified, education in family relations ceases to be the simple matter it was in the past and is sometimes assumed to be today. Many parents who pride themselves on following to the letter the prescribed rules for the physical hygiene of their children. Even among those who realize the importance of early control of behavior problems, there are many who are deeply concerned when their children lie, steal, or have temper tantrums but attach little or no significance to such unhealthy signs as undue self-consciousness, day-dreaming or jealousy. Still less do they realize that these delinquencies and manifestations of abnormal behavior may be due to their own attitude toward their children. Yet many cases of delinquency in children have been traced to the attempt of parents to make the child's life compensate for their own failure to reach certain goals of achievement; to the fact that the child has for years been buffeted between the rigid discipline of one parent and the extreme laxity of the other; to the dominating attitude of one member of the family group, which leaves the child no opportunity for asserting himself as an individual, and to similar forms of conflict between the needs of the child and the conditions prevailing in his family. Parental attitudes are of fundamental importance.