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Файл:Psychology and pedagogy. Study aid
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joint raising of children by all members of the clan. As social relations improved and
material wealth accumulated, a monogamous family took shape as a union of spouses
leading a joint household and raising their own children. Thus, the family was one of
the earliest social institutions designed to regulate human relations in connection with
the emergence of the initial forms of private property.
The earliest form of family, which has survived in many cases to the present
day, was the patriarchal family, in which relatives of several generations united under
the leadership of the eldest man — the owner of the means of subsistence. Relations
in a patriarchal family are authoritarian and involve the leading role of the older
generation. Its economic interdependence was so great that the isolation of its
individual members was practically impossible.
In the 20th century, as the welfare of the population of developed industrial
countries grew, the so-called nuclear family, uniting only spouses and their minor
children, became widespread. At the same time, single-parent families appeared on
a massive scale, consisting of only one parent with children. The nuclear family,
while providing its members with greater psychological independence compared to
the patriarchal family, has at the same time given rise to a number of problems associated with the loss of generational continuity. However, the absence of an age hierarchy of several generations led to the democratization of intrafamily relationships
and the style of family education.
In modern conditions, there are families of different types — both patriarchalauthoritarian and nuclear-democratic, as well as families of mixed forms, when, for
example, the cohabitation of several generations is no longer associated with a strict
family hierarchy. The economic functions of the family have receded into the background — the modern family is supported not so much by the need for joint survival,
but by economic and (or) psychological motives.
For thousands of years, the family has been the main form of socialization, including education, of a person. The question of its role in the formation of man attracted the attention of scientists and gave rise to conflicting opinions. Ancient philosophers, in particular Plato, argued that all the evil in the world, the selfishness of
people, their class inequality arises primarily from the presence of unequal conditions
of upbringing in the family. The excessive love of parents for their own child breeds
individualism, greed and other vices.
Philosophers of modern times also did not avoid this problem, although they
assessed it differently. T. Campanella, C. Fourier and V. Godwin believed that peo-
ple’s happiness is unattainable while maintaining a monogamous family and family
upbringing. They rejected this form of raising a child as an absolute evil. At the same
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time, T. More and G. Mably, insisting on monogamy, assumed a combination of family and public education. T. Desami and R. Owen saw the ideal of the future in a free
union of free people. At the same time, society must take upon itself maximum care
for raising children. Children should live with their parents only in infancy. Then they
must be raised in public children's institutions in order to overcome the heterogeneity
of the influence of father and mother on the child's worldview and create for each little citizen the same conditions for the development of his own abilities.
The latter point of view has gained some currency in Soviet pedagogical science. Until the beginning of the 60s of the 20th century, there was an opinion that the
state should take responsibility for raising children from birth to full general education. Modern scientists, without downplaying the role of public education, critically
reconsider this tendentious point of view, pointing out that the harmonious development of a child is most fully realized through a combination of family and public education, and not when they are opposed.
The concept and specifics of family education
In modern domestic pedagogical literature, family education is considered as a
process of pedagogical interaction between parents and other family members with
children in order to create the necessary social and pedagogical conditions for the
harmonious development of the child’s personality, the formation of vital personal
properties and qualities. At certain periods, nannies, tutors, home teachers and tutors
may be involved in family education. Consequently, family education is a more or
less conscious effort by adults to raise a child, which is aimed at ensuring that the
younger ones correspond to the older ones’ ideas about what a child, teenager, young
man or girl should be. At the same time, family education is also considered as an integral part of the relatively controlled socialization of a person in a modern civilized
society. It is carried out in inextricable connection with other types of social education — school and public. The problems of family education, in the part where they
come into contact with the school, are studied by general pedagogy, and in other aspects — by social pedagogy.
The determining role of the family is due to its profound influence on the entire
complex of physical and spiritual life of the person growing in it. In addition, the
family for a child is both a living environment and an educational environment.
Based on this, social educators believe that the family and the child are a mirror image of each other. As a result, it is in the family that those qualities are formed that
cannot be formed anywhere else. In addition, the family carries out socialization (ad-
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aptation to the surrounding community of people — society) of the individual, and is
a concentrated expression of its efforts in physical, moral and labor education, and
professional guidance of the younger generation. That is why it is the family that
forms the content of society: what a typical family is, so is society. It follows that the
most important social function of the family is raising a citizen, a patriot, a future
family man, and a law-abiding member of society. At the same time, it is in the family that other pedagogical tasks are solved. Their totality forms the content of family
education.
The content of education in the family is determined by the general goal of a
democratic society. The family is obliged to form a physically and mentally healthy,
highly moral, intellectually developed personality, ready for the upcoming work, social and family life. The implementation of this approach of Russian society to family
education involves its implementation in several independent but interrelated areas.
Their content can be reduced to the following positions.
Moral education in the family is a core component of the formation of the
child’s personality as a future active participant in interpersonal interaction. It in-
volves the formation of enduring human values in the younger generation — love,
respect, kindness, decency, honesty, justice, conscience, dignity, duty, etc.
Intellectual education involves the interested participation of parents in enriching children with knowledge, developing their need for its acquisition and constant
updating.
Aesthetic education is designed to develop the talents and gifts of children, to
give them an idea of the beauty that exists in life.
Physical education involves the formation of a child’s habit of leading a
healthy lifestyle and includes the correct organization of a daily routine, physical education and sports, hardening the body, etc.
Labor education lays the foundation for future independent life — professional
and social activities in the interests of the state, society and one’s own family.
The intimate-emotional sphere of family relationships and love for a child have
a unique influence on the nature of his gender education in other conditions25. Of particular importance in this regard is the diversity of moral feelings, in the formation of
which the family plays a decisive and irreplaceable role. The child receives all the
primary experience of platonic love and friendship in the family and, first of all, in
the form of the love and respect of the mother. Having learned to love their mother,
the child will subsequently, as an adult, always respect a woman, motherhood, and
family. Only in the family are born the moral and emotional values necessary for fu-
25
Gender education is one of the areas of education that involves the formation of a person’s personal prop-
erties and qualities depending on his gender.
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ture family life — marital feelings, paternal and maternal, filial and daughterly affections. In a family environment, a girl receives her first lessons in femininity through
the example of her mother, and a boy through the example of his father — masculinity.
The family makes a certain contribution to the formation of the child’s psycho-
logical gender, which includes a certain set of character traits, behavioral characteristics, attitudes, emotional reactions, etc. Currently, the roles of father and mother are
complementary, although partially similar. Parents, replacing and complementing
each other, solve various educational problems. Complementarity is associated primarily with the specifics of fulfilling male and female social roles in the family. The
male role of the father is usually expected to be energetic, strong, courageous, responsible for making decisions, etc. The role of the mother determines how children
can develop warmth, affection, forbearance, kindness and other moral qualities. It is
the mother who, first of all, creates the emotional climate in the family, strives to
meet the everyday needs of children, introduces them to communication with a wider
circle of relatives, and accustoms them to family traditions. However, parents — both
father and mother — jointly take care of their children, form their ideas about the
world and people, teach them to understand social situations, observe moral norms.
These are just the main directions of family education. In different families,
they are, to one degree or another, supplemented by economic, political, environmental and other areas of educational interaction between children and adults, depending
on the sociocultural environment of family education.
Sociocultural environment of family education
It is believed that the sociocultural environment is the leading component of
family education. This is explained by the fact that it acts as a specific system of
communication and interaction between its members that arise to satisfy their various
needs. In addition, the natural basis of the family is marriage and kinship ties, which
in a certain sense are primary. In addition to them, the family also includes economic,
legal, moral, emotional, psychological and other connections. Intrafamily relations
are also interconnected with national and everyday relations. In a generalized form, it
is the family that accumulates their entirety and forms the appropriate sociocultural
environment for family education.
In addition, the family is the fundamental social unit of society. The effectiveness of education depends on her moral and physical health. A healthy family is fully
connected with many other social communities: educational (kindergarten, school,
university), professional, social, and other families. The wider and deeper the connec-
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tions with them, the more meaningful, richer and more interesting life is, the stronger
the family itself and the stronger its position in the system of social relations.
The sociocultural environment of the family plays a decisive role in shaping
the needs and motives of the child’s activities, which at various stages of the family’s
life can include personal interest, love, the desire to do good, pride, healthy ambition,
and family honor. Pedagogically competent organization of life in a family forms
useful needs in a child: care for loved ones, love for them, spiritual communication
and shared experiences, reasonable consumption of material goods, fulfillment of any
household work out of conviction, habit and sense of duty, etc. First, the family, and
then together the school and the family form the content-organizational core of the
holistic educational process, around and within which all other educational forces are
concentrated, forming integrity in interaction.
The formation of the foundations of personality and its attitude to life depend
on the sociocultural environment of the family. In turn, the effectiveness of family
education depends largely on the connection between parents and school. The interaction of family, school, and the public is a living process of organizing the entire life
of children.
The family, as a specific manifestation of the sociocultural environment, is
characterized by natural self-government, which presupposes the distribution of functions among all its members and their responsible performance. It forms an informal
opinion on a variety of issues of public life. Consequently, the sociocultural environment of the family is a social microcosm, reflecting the entire set of social relations to
work, events in domestic and international life, culture, each other, order in the home,
family household, neighbors and friends, nature and animals. All this is the main nutritional environment in which children live and which they reflect in themselves.
The importance of the sociocultural environment of the family in the formation
and development of the individual is determined primarily by the fact that the relationships existing in it are the first specific example of social relations that a person
encounters from the moment of his birth. In addition, they focus and find a unique
miniature expression of the entire wealth of social relations, which creates the possibility of early inclusion of the child in their system. In turn, its leading role in education lies in the fact that its condition determines the measures of functioning and effectiveness of other components of the family’s educational potential. Any serious
deviation of intrafamily relations from the norm means inferiority, and often a crisis
of the given family, a loss of its educational capabilities.
Intrafamily relationships, as an element of the sociocultural environment of the
family, appear in the form of interpersonal relationships carried out in the process of
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communication. It is one of the socio-psychological mechanisms of personality development. The need for it is of a universal human nature and is the fundamental
highest social need of man. It is in the process of communicating with adults that a
child acquires speech and thinking skills, objective actions, masters the fundamentals
of human experience in various areas of life, learns and assimilates the rules of relationships, the qualities inherent in people, their aspirations and ideals, gradually embodying the moral foundations of life experience in their own activities.
In the system of intrafamily interpersonal relations, the dominant ones are the
relationships between spouses. They are the ones who create a family and define its
identity. The moral and emotional climate of the family, and, consequently, its educational capabilities, depends on the nature and state of marital relations. The degree of
expressiveness of marital relationships is presented differently in different types of
families, and their influence on the moral and mental development of children is different. Comparative studies have shown that, for example, the democratic type of relationship between spouses has a high educational potential. In such families, students' academic performance at school is significantly higher, and qualities such as
independence, discipline, hard work, modesty, responsibility, and self-criticism are
more developed. Children from such families show better preparedness for the role of
a future family man; the structure of their life goals is of greater social value than that
of students from families with a lower degree of democratization of relations.
Raising a child also largely depends on the contacts that are established be-
tween parents and children. The influence of parents’ relationships with children on
the characteristics of their development is diverse, as a result of which it deserves
separate consideration.
Manifestation of the relationship between parents
and children in family education
It should be noted that in the relationship between parents and children lies a
complex and rather paradoxical problem. Its complexity lies in the hidden, intimate
nature of intra-family relationships, the scrupulousness of “external” penetration into
them. And the paradox is that, despite all its importance, parents usually do not notice
it, because they do not have the necessary psychological and pedagogical preparation
for this.
It is known that the relationship between parents and children develops over
the years into certain typical variants, regardless of whether they are aware of them or
not. Such options begin to exist as the reality of relationships. Moreover, they can be
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presented in a certain structure — successive stages of development. Types of relationships emerge gradually. Parents turn to a social worker or psychologist, as a rule,
about an alarming situation that has already arisen “yesterday” or “a week ago.” That
is, they predominantly see not the process of formation and development of relationships, not their sequence and logic, but, as it seems to them, a sudden, inexplicable,
amazing act of a child.
In healthy families, parents and children are connected through natural, everyday contact. The concept of “contact” in a pedagogical sense can mean ideological,
moral, intellectual, emotional, business connections between parents and children,
such close communication between them, as a result of which spiritual unity and consistency of basic life aspirations and actions arise. The natural basis of such relationships is made up of family ties, feelings of motherhood and fatherhood, which are
manifested in parental love and the caring attachment of children to their parents.
However, as L.N. Tolstoy noted, all happy families are similar to each other, but each
unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Quite convincing evidence has been obtained that in families with strong contacts and respectful relationships, children more actively develop qualities such as
goodwill, the ability to empathize, the ability to resolve conflict situations, etc. They
are characterized by a more adequate awareness of the “I-image” (the self-image itself of themself in the system of interpersonal relationships), their integrity, a developed sense of human dignity. All this makes them sociable, providing high prestige in
the peer group. In families with an authoritarian attitude of parents towards children,
the formation of these qualities is difficult. In this regard, many researchers come to
the conclusion that the peculiarities of the relationship between parents and children
are fixed in their own behavior and become a kind of psychological model in their
further contacts with others.
The attitude of parents, which is characterized by negative emotional connotation, hurts and embitters the child. Since children's consciousness is prone to onesided conclusions and generalizations due to limited life experience, the child develops distorted judgments about people and erroneous criteria for their relationships.
The rudeness or indifference of parents gives the child reason to believe that a
stranger will cause them even more grief. This is how feelings of hostility and suspicion arise, and fear of other people. Consequently, the relationship between parents
and children that has developed in the family inevitably manifests itself in family education.
Scientists' study of the practice of family education has revealed some of the
main trends in the formation of unfavorable relationships between parents and chil-
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dren in the family. The analysis is based on a modification of the need for communication — one of the fundamental characteristics of interpersonal relationships. As a
result, teachers-researchers have identified the most compelling reasons that form a
negative educational environment in the majority of modern Russian families.
1. The low material level of most working families, when most of the parents’
time is spent on earning a living.
2. Low culture of public life, double morality of certain sections of society,
lack of confidence in the future, constant threat of job loss, fear of getting sick and
other reasons that lead parents to a state of heightened emotional stress.
3. Double burden on a woman in the family — work in production and solving
problems to ensure the daily functioning of the family (cooking, washing, cleaning
the premises, etc.).
4. A high percentage of divorces, which are the result of many social, moral
and ethical reasons, causing a fairly large number of so-called “single-parent
families.”
5. The prevailing public opinion is that the husband only helps his wife in raising children. The equal responsibility of parents for raising children, declared by law,
is only declared in practice.
6. Exacerbation of the conflict between generations at the level of parents and
children, caused by the uncontrolled influence of the media on the consciousness of
the younger generation, which do not correspond to the Russian national mentality of
moral and ethical values.
7. The gap between the educational activities of the family and the school.
A special place in the list of reasons for the formation of an unfavorable educational environment in families is occupied by the so-called “crisis of fathers.” Today
it manifests itself in the forms of single-parent families, drunkenness, and the father’s
detachment from the family. Social educators explain this phenomenon by a number
of objective and subjective reasons. Firstly, the pedagogical incompatibility of parents. Typically, such parents, in their interaction with the child, pursue different pedagogical goals and use opposing methods and means. Secondly, these are methods of
extremely harsh upbringing, as a result of which children begin to despise, fear and
even hate their father and flee from him by any means. Here, normal interaction is replaced by complete alienation, often giving rise to conflict situations in the family.
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Conflicts in family education
Conflict in family education is understood as a situation of unresolved (unresolvable) contradiction, in which parents and children experience acute psychological
discomfort and try to solve the problem unilaterally, using uncompromising ways and
methods. In relationships between parents and children, it extremely rarely arises accidentally and suddenly. Nature itself took care of the mutual affection of parents and
children, giving them on a subconscious level a kind of advance in the feeling of love
and need for each other. But how parents and children use this gift is the problem of
their communication and relationships.
The conflict atmosphere in the family explains the paradoxical situation when
“difficult” children grow up in families with good material conditions and relatively
high culture of parents (including pedagogical) and, conversely, when good children
grow up in poorly wealthy families with parents with low education. Neither material
conditions, nor culture, nor the pedagogical knowledge of parents are often able to
compensate for the educational inferiority of a stressful, tense family atmosphere.
Anomalies in the mental and moral development of a child that arise in conditions of
conflicting family relationships are not a consequence of them alone. They can arise
under the influence of a number of side, accompanying negative phenomena, which
often become the cause of conflict itself or act on it as catalysts (negative orientations
of parents, their low spiritual culture, selfishness, drunkenness, etc.).
It is believed that the conflict atmosphere of the family can adversely affect the
child already in the prenatal period of its development. The mother's anxiety, as a
consequence of a stressful situation, has a destructive effect on the fetus. Her emotional state is acutely perceived by children of any age. Where parental relationships
are distorted, children's development deviates from the norm. In such conditions, ideas about the ideals of love and friendship, which a person learns at an early age
through the example of the closest people — father and mother — are lost. In addition, conflict situations lead to severe mental trauma. Special studies have shown that
in families with abnormal relationships between spouses, children with mental and
psychological disorders are more than twice as likely. Children raised in families
where parents were constantly in conflict with each other have a noticeable increase
in the number of adverse neurological reactions.
What prevents you from creating a favorable environment in the family for the
full and harmonious personal formation and development of the child? Among the
main reasons, many social psychologists and educators include:
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- pedagogical heredity. The results of special studies have shown that if the
parents themselves had educational problems of an internal (personal) and external
(sociocultural) nature in childhood, then they should be prepared for the fact that
these problems at a subconscious level can manifest themselves in their own educational activities;
- changing and increasingly complex living conditions. In the lives of parents
there was not much of what surrounds their children and causes them to have completely different demands and needs. Their non-recognition or parents’ awareness of
the impossibility of satisfaction generates tension in relationships with children or
their intrapersonal tension;
- decrease in the level of pedagogical culture of parents. This was partly possible for the reasons already stated (separation of the family from school, lack of time
for parents to analyze and rationally manage interactions with children, etc.). However, in many cases, this is usually due to insufficient parental responsibility for upbringing or a complete absence thereof.
There is no doubt that the above and a number of other multidirectional reasons
give rise to an appropriate reaction on the part of children. The formation of its character and direction is influenced by two factors: the individual psychological characteristics of the child and the specific influence of parents or other family members. In
the pedagogical literature they are considered as typical reactions of children. Let's
look at the most typical of them.
A prank is a short, episodic segment of a child’s behavior that slightly violates
the existing rules of behavior, in which his activity, initiative, and ingenuity are clearly demonstrated.
Mischief is a child’s deliberate minor violation of established rules in order to
obtain a certain moral or material benefit for himself.
Caprice is expressed in inappropriate actions and misconduct, unreasonable
opposition and resistance to the instructions, advice and demands of adults. Outwardly, it manifests itself in dissatisfaction, irritability, and motor overexcitation.
Disobedience is the most common form of resistance in preschool and primary
school age to the demands, requests, advice of parents, and moral standards of family
and public behavior.
An offense is a premeditated action that causes damage to another person or to
the relationships that have developed in a given society. Most often it is explained by
age-related characteristics, the child’s inability to voluntarily suppress his momentary
desires and manage his own behavior.
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