Problems of Family Life
- Author:
Agatha Bowley, Ph.D.
& S. Livingstone Ltd. Price 5s.
Dr Bowley brings to her study of family life a wealth of detailed material, culled from extensive case work undertaken in her position as Senior Psychologist to the City of Leicester Education Committee. She discusses the problems which children present to their parents, teachers and the psychological worker and the book caters in part for each type of worker. There is an admirable first chapter on the elements of happy family life, which leads one to expect that here will be a useful book for the inquiring parent, wanting immediate guidance on specific difficulties. Thereafter, however, the book falls between three stools. It gives very little specific guidance for either parents or teachers and the psychological worker, who has had to struggle with recalcitrant children and anxious parents, finds it hard to square her own experience of children’s developmental difficulties with the statistical summary which lays a these difficulties chiefly at the door of environmental circumstances.
Dr Bowley notes that a large percentage of her cases feel themselves unwanted and insecure, and that lack of family affection is causative in a large number of delinquent cases. ” Delinquency or difficult behaviour is the child’s protest against such circumstances.” These statements, while true in part, read with a false emphasis to the case worker who finds so many mentally healthy children surviving poor circumstances and so many difficulties occurring under good family circumstances. The child’s phantasies and his imaginative interpretation of his experiences receive almost no attention throughout, and of a certainty these are very fundamental factors in delinquency as well as in minor cases of difficulty.
Dr Bowley’s emphasis on environment would be less of a drawback to her book’s usefulness if some study of how parental attitudes, which are a large part of environment, can be changed, had been included; but it is less than enough to say that ” If mothers and fathers would only consider more carefully the results of their ill advised marriages and liaisons, many of the neuroses of children could be avoided.” This can only be the starting point of child guidance. The question is, where do we go from here ? Social legislation to improve material circumstances is one fruitful direction. Another is to make available the result of scientific child study to parents through Parent Advice Bureaux. The important factor in maladjustment is surely the way children react to adverse circumstances by building complicated unconscious phantasies to explain their hardships to themselves. These are the real sources of their maladjustment, and this is where the psychologist can help. Child guidance, if it is to be effective, must be prepared to use its influence on future social legislation, but its immediate work is with distorted attitudes of children and parents and, much less than it believes, with changing environments which are dour and intractable things while parental attitudes remain unmodified. R.T.
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