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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
Out of my normal context, and separated from my usual reference groups, perhaps I need first of all to explain the background from which I speak. As a developmental psychologist whose main research interests are to do with child rearing in the various social environments in which it takes place, I have been particularly concerned with the long-term dialogues (verbal and non-verbal) that go on between parents and children, in the course of which they commonly come to certain understandings about their mutual tolerances and intolerances, and learn to live together with some regard to these limits. I stress the intersubjective nature of these understandings because I take it as axiomatic that children bring up their parents in the course of parents bringing up their children, even though parents are more powerful in physical terms and marginally more powerful in psychological terms. Secondly, as a child psychologist working clinically with parents and handicapped or problem children, I am also interested in another kind of dialogue: that which takes place between parents and professionals with the child as focus. I am concerned to find ways of making this dialogue as effective as possible, in particular by recognising the differences that inform parental and professional approaches to our common focus, and then using these differences to enable a complementary partnership that builds upon the advantages of each.
1 John, Newson and Elizabeth, , Infant Care in an Urban Community, 1963Google Scholar; Four Years Old in an Urban Community, 1968Google Scholar; Seven Years Old in the Home Environment, 1976Google Scholar; Perspectives on School at Seven Years Old, 1977; all Allen and Unwin, London.Google Scholar
2 Elizabeth, Newson, ‘Parents as a resource in diagnosis and assessment’, in Oppé, T. and Woodford, P. (eds.), Early Management of Handicapping Disorders, Elsevier, Excerpta Medica, Amsterdam, 1976.Google Scholar
3 Elizabeth, Newson, ‘Towards an understanding of the parental role’, conference papers, National Children's Bureau, 1972.Google Scholar
4 Rod, Ballard, ‘Early management of handicap: the parents' needs’Google Scholar, in Oppé, and Woodford, , 1976, op. cit.Google Scholar
5 Sheila, Hewett, The Family and the Handicapped Child, Allen and Unwin, 1970.Google Scholar
6 This quotation and the following one both from Kelly, G., The Psychology of Personal Constructs: Vol. 1: A theory of personality. Norton, New York, 1955.Google Scholar
7 Significantly, it is those voluntary organisations which have tried to respond like a caring family to ‘unreasonable’ expressions of need in individuals, who have shown most effectiveness: the Samaritans, for example.
8 Hugh Jolly, the paediatrician whose Book of Child Care is probably the most comprehensive and practical guide for parents since Spock, initiated a crusade for ‘taking family life into the bedroom’ by allowing children into the parental bed, in his column in The Times, 1.12.76.
9 Newson, J. and , E., 1977, op. cit.Google Scholar
10 Newson, J. and , E., 1963, 1968, 1976, 1977, op. cit.Google Scholar
11 Bruner, J. S., The relevance of education, Allen and Unwin, London, 1972.Google Scholar