Review of The psychology of parent-child relationships

Abstract

Reviews the book, The psychology of parent-child relationships by Percival M. Symonds (1939). The literature of mental hygiene for the past twenty years has contained much on the problem of parent-child relationships. As with so many other aspects of the dynamics of behavior the earliest interest in this particular problem is found among the psychoanalysts. During the early 1930's Dr. D. M. Levy formulated an hypothesis concerning maternal over-protection and rejection which was then investigated by students at the Smith College School for Social Work. In the present book Dr. Symonds has summarized these investigations as a preface to the reports of his own research. The author proposes that parental attitudes can be represented on a plane whose coordinates are acceptance-rejection and dominance-submission. In two separate investigations the author studied the behavior of children living in families where the parental attitudes lay at the extremes of these axes. The results are too extensive for statement in this review, but are summarized in terms of the accepted and dominated children. This book is a very satisfactory summary of the literature on parent-child relations, and the original investigations reported are an acceptable addition to a limited experimental literature. It is a "must" on the reading list of every psychologist working with children. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)