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Birth Order and Family Size of School-Phobic Adolescents

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

Ian Berg ,
Alan Butler  and
Ralph McGuire
Ian Berg
Affiliation:
Highlands, Scalebor Park Hospital, Burley-in-Wharfedale, Yorkshire
Alan Butler
Affiliation:
Highlands, Scalebor Park Hospital, Burley-in-Wharfedale, Yorkshire
Ralph McGuire
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh, 60 The Pleasance, Edinburgh, 8 (formerly University of Leeds)
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Extract

It has been found that young people suffering from school phobia, particularly those of secondary school age in Britain, tend to be the youngest in their family (Hersov, 1960; Smith, 1970). This paper reports an investigation carried out in an attempt to confirm and extend this observation. A hundred school-phobic youngsters admitted to Highlands, a psychiatric in-patient unit for adolescents, were looked at from the point of view of order in the sibship; in this respect they were compared with 91 non-school-phobic children suffering from neurotic or conduct disorders admitted to the same hospital unit and with 127 randomly selected normal secondary school children stratified for age, sex and social class. The state of excessive dependency which appears to exist between mothers and their children in school phobia, even in early adolescence (Berg and McGuire, 1971) may be partly due to the circumstance of the affected individual being a younger child in the family.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 121 , Issue 564 , November 1972 , pp. 509 - 514
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1972 

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References

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