The Relation of Parental Authority to Children's Behaviour Attitudes: By Marian J. Radke. (Minnesota University Press. London: Geoffrey Cumberlege. Price 11 s. 6 d.)

This is an enquiry on the one hand into the attitudes adopted by a group of parents of good social and professional standing, in the upbringing of their children of nursery school age (3 years 10 months–5 years 10 months); and, on the other, into the social behaviour and attitudes to parental discipline of the children themselves; the objective being to determine the degree and significance of the interrelatedness of the two. The author addressed parallel questionnaires to both groups covering the severity of restrictions imposed in the home, the relative responsibility of both parents for control, the child's relations with his siblings and the parents' underlying philosophy of education. The material was sifted to yield information on the correspondence between parental and infantile attitudes as well as between these attitudes and the children's social behaviour as observed in standard situations involving projective techniques and in nursery school.

The assumption underlying the methodology of the enquiry, viz. that the subjects' reports upon their own attitudes can be taken at their face value, implies a disconcerting unawareness of the factor of ambivalence, and the unconscious defensive distortions to which the replies are open. The slight and inconclusive nature of the findings on the main issue may be attributable in part to this fact. In greater part they are due to the rather too simple assumption underlying the details of the questionnaires that the core of the parent child relationship at this age is to be found in the democratic or autocratic discipline the parent exerts in certain very generally defined social circumstances within the home. From an analytic viewpoint it is conceivable that an autocratic attitude may be the mark of a rejecting parent, and it is therefore possible to interpret in this light the loose connection which the enquiry establishes between this attitude on the parents' part, and over-submissive or otherwise unsocial behavio