Tom Phillips The Influence Of Family Climate

The Influence of Family Climate

Growing up my family did not have the best relationship. My parents often fought with each other. They would fight very loud. My house was unstable when it came to emotions. People would not communicate well with each other. Although this caused a huge division for a relationship with my parents it caused my siblings and I to get closer. When they would fight we would do things like play board games in our bedrooms or listen to music to try and drown out the screaming. This was how life was up until my 16th birthday. My parents had separated and my siblings and I had to leave our house and go live with my aunt and uncle for the week of my birthday. Although I was close with my siblings we did not have relationships

After reading the article “The Influence of Family Structure Vs. Family Climate on Adolescent Well-Being” by Tommy M. Phillips my mind has completely changed. I always thought that you needed to have a mother, father and maybe siblings to have a good family, this article has proved that wrong with the research that was found from the surveys they did. I found this interesting because I always thought that family structure was a huge key in the well-being of a child. After reading this study I was kind of surprised by the results they found. In this study the did surveys that had kids answer curtain questions to find the answer they needed. They found that the phrase “two parents are better than one” is not true. It does not really matter the structure of the family as much as it matters the relationship of the family. I thought that if you had one parent it would not be as good as if you had two parents. This study proved that

Phillips, talks about the way they surveyed kids and then discusses the results which helps get the readers point across. Phillips talks about three scales. One scale is called “Rosenberg’s Self-Esteem Scale” this scale is used to understand the self-esteem of the child and looks at if there is a difference in the family structure and the self-esteem of the child. This scales showed that the mean self-esteem was high. The scores could fall between 5-20 and the mean score was 14.87. The other scale was “Hopelessness Scale for Children” this scale showed the hopelessness the children had, they used this to see if the family structure would affect their helplessness or not. They found that the scale was 5-20 and the higher the score the more hopelessness they had. The mean was 9.28 so this means that the children were very hopeful and not feeling hopeless. The third scale was “Delinquent Attitude Scale” this scale looked at whether family structure would affect your delinquent attitude or not. The high the score the more you were likely to have a delinquent attitude. They found that the mean was 23.91 on a scale of 13-52. This shows that family structure did not have a great influence on delinquent