You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The Term “family climate” has certain connotations. In recent years the expanding interest in “family psychiatry” has broadened the concept of attitudes which impinge on children in their home. The concept of climate now refers not only to overall maternal attitudes or overall paternal attitudes. It includes as well the concept of an emotional and attitudinal climate engendered by the interactive processes of both parents and thus on the child, and indeed the interactive processes involving all of the family members including feedbacks in which the child himself plays an active part. Such terms are used as “hostile climate,” a “climate of love,” of “dissension,” “indifference,” of “hate,” of “permissiveness,” of “compulsiveness.” Such terms are used to characterize either an individual in the family or the family's overall climate. The concept conjures up an overall set of attitudes which constantly impinge upon the child's thoughts and acts and against which his interests, strivings, attitudes and feelings react.
Certain assumptions are implied either explicity or implicitly. These assumptions are expressed in psychiatric discussions, in case conferences wherever the concern is to understand the forces which may have shaped the child's inappropriate behavior, fixate this in a neurotic direction, and possibly be the precursor of the character neurosis of the adult he will become. There are three important assumptions:
That the attitudes designating the parent are global in nature; such overall attitudinal characterizations imply that the stated attitude characterizes the parent's behavior in all or most situations with the child. Such terms as a hostile mother, a rejecting father or an overcritical parent assume that the term used describes a pervasive attitude toward the child against which his self-image is developing.
That the particular characteristic described in the parent or the family will have the same effect on all children; that all children whose mothers ha