By Sharon Jayson, USA TODAY
The way your family interacts at home can affect how your kids do in school, suggests a study in the journal Child Development.
Researchers at the University of Rochester in New York and the University of Notre Dame in Notre Dame, Ind., spent three years looking at the relationship patterns of 234 two-parent families with 6-year-olds and found a distinct family-school connection, with certain family types predicting problems in school.
Families can be a support to children in the early grades or they can be a source of stress and distraction, says lead author Melissa Sturge-Apple, an assistant professor of psychology at Rochester.
The researchers didn't look at academic achievement but rather focused on social, emotional and behavioral adjustment. However, past research has found that the ability to adjust in school sets the stage for academic success.
Researchers evaluated each family annually, in two visits of two to three hours each.
"We have a marital assessment, a parent-child assessment for moms and dads separately, and we have the whole family together," Sturge-Apple says. "It gave us a much broader look at the family system per se."
The team found data that support the theory of three distinct psychological types of families:
•COHESIVE: Characterized by emotional warmth.
•DISENGAGED: Characterized by cold, controlling and withdrawn relationships.
•ENMESHED: Characterized by moderate warmth and emotional involvement, but also hostility and meddling.
The research "is more evidence that it does matter how members of the family interact with each other," says L. Alan Sroufe, emeritus professor of child development at the University of Minnesota-Minneapolis, who has read the study, published July 15.
Researchers said children from families characterized as disengaged had the most problems; they started out in school with higher levels of aggressive and disruptive behavior and had more difficulty focusing and cooperating.
The behaviors worsened each year, researchers found.
Children from families described as enmeshed entered school with no more disciplinary problems or depression and withdrawal than their peers from cohesive families, but later began to suffer higher levels of anxiety and feelings of loneliness and alienation.
On average, Sturge-Apple says, those from cohesive families showed fewer problems.
And, the study found that the majority the families do fall into the well-functioning zone — 59% were cohesive; while the remainder were an almost even split — 22% enmeshed and 19% disengaged.
But Sturge-Apple says a child's own resilience and personality can overcome a troubled home environment.
And, the authors say, dysfunctional family relationships aren't responsible for all school behavior problems; other risk factors include living in high-crime neighborhoods, attending high-poverty schools and associating with troubled peers. Having a cohesive family "doesn't always mean the kids are OK," she says.
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