Home is a most powerful culture

The most powerful culture that influences all our lives is the family culture. Every family is a unique culture and members of this culture will apply their intellectual potential to acquire knowledge and skills that will help them to adapt to and develop in that social system.

Children are not passive recipients of family influences. On the contrary, each child within a family strives actively to establish his own identity and will often go directly emotionally, behaviourally, creatively and intellectually opposite to a brother or sister.

This process of individuation continues when children move into the wider social systems of school, neighbourhood, peer group and so on. Owing to this process of identity-formation, children will necessarily and creatively acquire knowledge in different areas of intellectual functioning, depending on what is valued and modelled by parents and significant others and how they can best be seen for themselves within the family and other social systems.

When children come from an "advantaged" home, where mother and father have a close emotional relationship, where they have talked and read on a one-to-one basis to the child, where the parents themselves value and are actively involved in promoting their own learning, where strong educational stimulation of an academic nature is present, then children will emerge from that home with high verbal and numerical knowledge, high general knowledge, good social and emotional skills, good physical co-ordination abilities and self-reliant and independent living skills.

They will also posses a high to moderate level of self-worth, be motivated to learn and have a love of challenge.

When children come from a family culture wherein parents do not have a close emotional bond, where little one-to-one talking and reading has been done with the children, where education and academic learning has been neither modelled or valued, these children will come into school classrooms with poor self-worth, poor linguistic and numerical skills, poor social and emotional knowledge and poor motivation to learn school knowledge.

However, they may posses knowledge not appreciated or even seen by the teachers. To mention a few: humour, sports skills, manual skills and interpersonal knowledge of a nature that controls, dominates and manipulates others.

Frequently, these children are labelled 'slow' or 'weak' and would perform poorly on an intelligence test. But they do not lack intelligence. Certainly, they may have a weak knowledge of many of the school curriculum subjects and of the types of knowledge measured by an intelligence test, but they have ingeniously learnt what was necessary for them to survive within their unique family culture.

Problems in learning may also arise in families that may be materially and educationally "advantaged" but put major emphasis on academic performance and "family image". Children quickly learn, even pre-school, to either adapt to such conditionality, or to rebel, or to develop clever avoidance and sickness strategies to offset emotional rejection.

I have no doubt that parents always want the best for their children, but it is only possible to do this when parents are free of or at least know their own fears and complexes.

Each family is a unique culture and it is important that parents, who are the architects of the culture, evaluate how members interact with each other and how each feels about self.

It is equally true that each school and each classroom is a unique culture and that parents need to be vigilant for any signs that their children are not thriving emotionally, socially and educationally within those different settings. Close liaison with the school and teachers is essential.

Children are born with a natural curiosity and eagerness to learn. To ensure that children do not lose the innate love of learning parents would do well to take note of the following suggestions.

Learning must never jeopardise parents' loving of children.

Learning must only have positive associations.

An absence of criticism, ridicule, cajoling, comparisons is crucial.

Emphasis must be put on effort and not performance.

Failure must be embraced as an opportunity for further learning, not for criticism.

Children must be seen for themselves, not for their academic attainments.

Do not label children as "weak", "slow", "brilliant".

Affirm each child for his or her unique and limitless intelligence.

If you cannot be patient do not help with homework.

The presence of encouragement, support and fun eases the challenge of learning.

Dr Tony Humphreys is a consultant clinical psychologist and author of Self-Esteem the Key to Your Child's Education.