Abstract
The present study will focus on George Kelly's Personal Construct Theory (1955),
as an explanation of how parents acquire their ideas, theories or constructs about
how to parent their children.
The following literature review will introduce Kelly's theory of personal constructs
and provide an overview of the development of personal construct systems. This
information will then be linked to how parent's own experience of being parented
leads to the development of their construct systems concerning parenting and how
these constructs affect their relationships with their children. The importance of the
attachment process is discussed with reference to the parent's experience of being
parented and how this subsequently affects their ability to form a secure bond with
their child and to parent effectively. The nature of parenting difficulties experienced
by some parents is then discussed with reference to the factors that contribute to a
breakdown in parenting. Studies reviewing the efficacy of interventions for
enhancing the parent-child relationship suggest that behavioural training in varying
formats lead to an improvement in child behaviour. The main aims of the current
study were to investigate whether changes in parent's personal construing can be
affected by parent's undertaking an intervention group. The aims of the intervention
group were to develop the parent-child relationship, to encourage the participants to
share parenting skills and also to provide a psychotherapeutic environment for
parents to discuss their own childhood experiences of being parented. Kelly suggests
that three conditions exist that are favourable to the formation of new constructs,
these are, an atmosphere of experimentation, the provision of new elements, (for
example mixing with new people) and finally the validation of new constructs by
someone in the therapeutic role. By providing these conditions in the form of an
intervention group it was hypothesised that parents undertaking the group would
have the necessary atmosphere to effect change in their personal construct system
and as a
consequence of this their relationships with their children and the quality of
their parenting would improve.
The final part of the literature review gives an overview of studies that have looked
at the measurement of change in personal constructs following psychotherapeutic
intervention.
