Parents of Schizophrenic Children*

Some years ago, an agency that treated children asked me to work with a group of parents of schizophrenic children. The purpose of forming the group was to help these parents be more effective in the management of their children at home. I welcomed this opportunity. When I started my formal training in child psychiatry I had become increasingly aware that psychiatric treatment of young children without parental involvement was ineffective.

With more experience, I am now most convinced that most failures in child psychotherapy are due to inadequate management and misunderstanding of the parent-child and parent-therapist relationship than to any other cause, and unless parental cooperativeness is achieved, my psychiatric treatment with children usually fails. With older adolescents, negative attitudes of parents could be overcome. This is not true with the young child. The opportunity of working with parents was additionally welcome since people working with children may see only one parent, and only under special circumstances will both parents be seen, especially more than one time.

The formation of this group of parents also offered me an opportunity to test my thoughts about troubled children. Up to that time, despite the fact I had years of combined training and experience with children, I had made the simplistic judgment that parents were responsible for emotional disturbance in their children and this process could be reversed by the adoption of “sensible child rearing” practices. From the beginning of this group, I wanted to test my observations about parents of troubled children, to observe the interaction and communication between parents, and to try to experience in some way what it felt like being a child of these parents. So at the onset, my primary objective was research. And I would offer the parents what they