Prevention in family services : approaches to family wellness / edited by David R. Mace.
- Date:
- [1983], ©1983
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Credit: Prevention in family services : approaches to family wellness / edited by David R. Mace. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![Guerney, Guerney, and Sebes [217] actions of newborn and mother are now known to be the outcome of a delicate fragile process of early socialization that can easily be disrupted if the proper conditions to nuture the process are not present. Yet, as Bronfenbrenner (1979) said, A young person can graduate from high school at age 18 never having done a piece of work for anybody else, never having held a baby in his/ her arms for more than a minute, never having cared for someone who is old or ill, never having had to comfort the lonely. The result is a genera¬ tion of helpless misfits who do not know how to live with other human beings [pp. 35-36]. In addition to the interpersonal competencies specified by Bron¬ fenbrenner, there is the vast area of socialization of the individual to full participation in a democratic society. In fact, that is the raison d'être of the school system: Public schools were established in order that all citizens should be made active and enlightened citizens in . . . government of the people, by the people, and for the people ... (Tippett, 1936). The central supporting psychoaffective pillar of democracy is compassionate empathy: the recognition that another's views may be as valid, perhaps even more valid than one's own, and therefore the desire to fully experience ideas and values from others' perspectives. We now know that this is an attitude, a skill, which can be taught. The school is a proper place to teach it along with other affective and interpersonal skills. Even effective vocational preparation per se now requires the teaching of affective and interpersonal skills. Technological, scien¬ tific, managerial, and skilled labor requires such skills more than ever before. Such endeavors now are predominantly matters of team effort, and working effectively on a team requires affective and interper¬ sonal skills. Also, in today's work world, the provision of services occupies a greater place proportional to the production of goods than in the past. Good service-providing requires high levels of psycho¬ social skill. One last point: The day of reading and talking computers that can translate voice to print and print to speeded-voice is dawning. When it arrives, psychosocial skills may be far more essential to almost everyone than the ability to read and write! It is not too early for the schools to begin planning to give even more emphasis to psychosocial](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18037604_0220.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
