What’s New? What’s Normal?1

This article is a response to Amitai Etzioni’s article, “The New Normal,” published in this issue.     

Discipline and socialization of children in abusive and non-abusive families

This qualitative study examines how abusive parents' increasingly harsh administration of authoritative and punitive discipline socialized their children to act aggressively and asocially within their families' escalating interpersonal conflict. In comparison, non-abusive parents used successive instructive and authoritative discipline directing their children to engage in pro-social behaviors within their families' routine complementary role social interactions and mutual decision-making processes. These findings suggest that assessment procedures and interventive goals be changed to safeguard children in abusive families from both physical injury and dysfunctional socialization practices of their parents.     

A Conceptual Framework for Visualizing Composite Indicators

Social Indicators Research - Human development index (HDI) integrating greenness and fairness indicators is an important reference for global governance. This paper used the geometric method to...     

The School System and Special Education: Causes and Effects in the Twentieth Century

The article delineates a line of development in which special education and the increasing need for it are connected with the gradual institutionalisation of the modern school model in the school system. In a model of this type the teacher must use the limited time available efficiently to attain the set objectives, which means that any interruptions or disturbances jeopardise the possibility of achieving important goals with the time-limit, and diversity among students becomes a problem. In other words, the more modern the school, the stricter the criteria for normality, the finer the evaluation system, the finer the screening used and, as a result, the greater the amount of deviance which must be handled by special measures.     

HELP AND HINDRANCE: PARENTS OF DIVORCING CHILDREN*

Much research exists on the impact of divorce on the nuclear family. Less is known about the response of the extended family to a divorce. In this study, the authors examined divorcing children's perceptions of their parents' behavior; divorcing children experienced their parents' reactions as supportive, non-supportive, or “mixed.” Types of helpful behaviors were categorized and patterns of unhelpful parental behavior were elaborated. Implications of the study for therapy and for an understanding of parent-adult child relationships are discussed.