The parents of school phobic adolescents - a preliminary investigation of family life variables.

Parents were interviewed at home in a preliminary study of family life variables. Forty-eight had children admitted to an adolescent in-patient unit, 19 of them for school phobia and the remainder because of other psychiatric conditions. Difficulty in obtaining a comparable group from the normal school population resulted in only 12 such families being studied in addition. The psychiatric cases were reliably separated into school phobic and other problems. Practically all the school phobics had neurotic disorders. Contact of parents with relatives and friends, their leisure activities outside the home, their patterns of work and their management of domestic affairs, were looked at. It was thought that these aspects of family functioning might be distinctive where there was a school phobic youngster and that an abnormal pattern of family life might predispose a child to this disorder. In fact, no evidence emerged to suggest that parents of school phobic adolescents participate in, or make decisions about, family life activities in any way different from parents of other psychiatric cases or normal controls.