Parental attitudes and family relations with preschoolers: correction of deviations

Statement of the problem. Intra-family problems, such as: family crises, inconsistency of spouses’ actions, negative parental attitudes and destructive parenting style have a huge impact on the formation of a healthy personality of preschoolers. The purpose of the article is to describe the approbation of the author’s program of how to work with parents of preschoolers (created on the basis of the Preschool Educational Institution) to eliminate deviations in child-parent relations, adjust the parenting style, improve the quality of emotional contact between parents and children. Research methodology. The author of the article proposed her own correctional program “Family is a Single System”, i.e., a series of trainings, lectures and conversations aimed at improving child-parent contact diagnosed using PARI (Parental Attitude Research Instrument) and AFR (Analysis of Family Relationships) methodology. One hundred thirty-seven parents were pre-diagnosed, and then a control group (86 people) and an experimental group (61 people) were allocated for training using the author’s program. Research results. As a result, the proposed program showed significant improvements in normalization and harmonization of child-parent relations on the following patterns of the PARI methodology: “excessive concentration on a child”, “optimal emotional contact”, and “excessive emotional distance”. There was a positive trend towards self-determination of parents and their attitude to the family role, which indicates the effectiveness of group work with parents. Conclusion. The maximum improvements are observed on the pattern “excessive concentration on a child” (from 68,9 to 32,8 % according to low estimates and from 19,7 to 11,5 % according to high estimates), successes are also noted on the following patterns: “optimal emotional contact” (from 18,0 to 14,8 % according to low estimates and from 14,7 to 9,8 % according to high estimates) and “excessive emotional distance” (36,1 to 32,8 % according to low estimates and from 13,1 to 11,5 % according to high estimates). The change of correlation dependencies and the appearance of new ones is shown according to the results of the training. There were no changes in child-parent contact among the parents of the control group who did not pass the training. Author’s contribution. The author’s program has been successfully tested on the basis of Municipal Budgetary Pre-school Educational Institution No. 174 in Cheboksary and is recommended to teachers-psychologists of other children’s educational institutions in Cheboksary for implementation when working with parents of preschoolers not only on the problems of child-parent relations, but also on improvement of parents’ self-education in the field of child upbringing, self-disclosure and quality of life.