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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![[218] FAMILY WELLNESS THROUGH EDUCATION skill training—for teachers as well as students—than to traditional cognitive subject matter. And what would be wrong with that? What good is it if students learn technical skills if these end up being used in the service of conflict and atomic annihilation? With that we rest our case for the legitimacy of a prominent place in the public schools for affective education and psychosocial skill training. The next questions are; What psychosocial skills, in general, are the schools now teaching? And—more important, because for the foreseeable future the family will continue to be the institution in which individuals learn either compassion and love or intolerance and hatred—what psychosocial skills are the schools teaching that directly promote family wellness? Space limitations prevent detailed, exhaustive answers to these questions. However, in broad perspec¬ tive we can answer as follows. FAMILY-SCHOOL RELATIONSHIPS The interdependence between school and family in the socializa¬ tion of children has long been recognized. Much has been written about the invaluable contribution of family to children's academic progress and attitudes toward learning and, conversely, the value of teachers' interest and intervention in the families of their pupils. Methods of involving parents with formal education through PTAs, parent advisory committees, Home-State programs, and the like have been developed which serve primarily to upgrade formal education. Schools also have helped the family by providing health and safety programs, nutritious lunches and breakfasts, clothing exchanges, supervised programs for children who must arrive early and/or stay late, and so forth. Such direct support is critical to families, but contributes little to increasing the internal strengths of families. Rarely has the goal of any of these programs been a full sharing of mutually defined responsibility for the life education of children. Recognition of this broader goal as legitimate is developing slowly and unevenly, ebbing and flowing with changes in the economic and political climates. Nonetheless, recently steps have been taken in hundreds of instances to provide programs that educate students in personal and interpersonal competencies and for assuming adult roles in the family context. In selecting the types of activities under-](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18037604_0221.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
