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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![[220] F AM IL Y WELLNESS THRO UGH ED UCA TION individual group members whose status is low. Contributions such children make to the group are cited. Group status has been shown to increase along with a concomitant rise in self-esteem. Programs for children as young as kindergarten—earliest among them are the Bessell and the Palomares Magic Circle—cover awareness of feelings and the building of self-confidence. The DUSO (Developing Under¬ standing of Self and Others) program by Dinkmeyer also can be considered a self-esteem building program. The SEE ( Self-Enhancing Education) project is another model program. Project HELP, conducted by the Rhode Island Department of Education, is a unique program designed to help youngsters from grades three through six function independently in the home while left there alone. The project HELP curriculum is designed to teach life skills that enable children to become self-sufficient and to build self- esteem by showing them how competent they really can be on their own. Program developers see the need for developing self-competence in children for home life because of the many parents who are away all day working and the many single parents who rely on the children to take over many adult chores including childcare. Indirectly, an understanding and valuing of self is believed to result from including an emphasis on children's feelings about themselves and about others, while at the same time being taught in traditional academic subjects. Of course, teachers need not limit themselves to certain specified occasions; they can incorporate concern for affec¬ tive development into their daily teaching plans (as in Confluent Education). Interestingly, there is evidence that an emphasis on affective education with its concern for the development of self results in higher academic performance as well as individual and interper¬ sonal esteem. PROGRAMS FOR DEVELOPING INTERPERSONAL COMPETENCE Many programs have been incorporated into the public schools that involve training in skills that improve the interpersonal compe¬ tence of children in the school setting. Conceivably, because of the prosocial nature of these competencies, the children's families benefit as well as the school group even though direct efforts to transfer skills to nonschool settings are rarely included.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18037604_0223.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
