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Thursday, July 15, 2010

Your family 'type' can affect your kids at school - USATODAY.com

Your family 'type' can affect your kids at school - USATODAY.com
Your family 'type' can affect your kids at school
Updated 11h 28m ago | Comments 28 | Recommend E-mail | Save | Print | Reprints & Permissions | Subscribe to stories like this
The Huxtable family from the 1980s-era TV sitcom 'The Cosby Show' would be an example of a cohesive (happy) family marked by warm and emotionally close relationships with individual autonomy.
Enlarge image EnlargeNBC
The Huxtable family from the 1980s-era TV sitcom 'The Cosby Show' would be an example of a cohesive (happy) family marked by warm and emotionally close relationships with individual autonomy.
The Barone family from the sitcom 'Everybody Loves Raymond,' which ran until 2005, would be an example of an enmeshed family marked by conflict and emotion,w ith modest amounts of warmth, high levels of hostility, destructive meddling and a limited sense of family as a team.
EnlargeCBS
The Barone family from the sitcom 'Everybody Loves Raymond,' which ran until 2005, would be an example of an enmeshed family marked by conflict and emotion,w ith modest amounts of warmth, high levels of hostility, destructive meddling and a limited sense of family as a team.
The family in the 1980 Oscar-winning movie 'Ordinary People,' where the parents retreat emotionally after the death of their oldest son, would be an example of a disengaged (unhappy) family marked by rigid, cold, controlling and emotionally withdrawn relationships.
EnlargeParamount Pictures
The family in the 1980 Oscar-winning movie 'Ordinary People,' where the parents retreat emotionally after the death of their oldest son, would be an example of a disengaged (unhappy) family marked by rigid, cold, controlling and emotionally withdrawn relationships.
By Sharon Jayson, USA TODAY
The way your family interacts at home can affect how your kids do in school, a study suggests today in the journal Child Development.

Researchers at the University of Rochesterin New York and the University of Notre Dame in Notre Dame, Ind., spent three years looking at the relationship patterns in 234 families with 6-year-olds and found a distinct family-school connection, with certain family types predicting problems in school.

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," says lead author Melissa Sturge-Apple, assistant professor of psychology at Rochester. "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:

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