Effects of child rearing by schizophrenic mothers

In an attempt to assess the effect of child rearing by schizophrenic mothers, two groups of 25 children born to schizophrenic mothers were studied. One group was reared by their mothers; the other group was reared from an early age by agents without a history of psychiatric illness. The groups were matched individual to individual for sex, age, and socio-economic status. The procedures employed included a psychiatric interview, a school report questionnaire, a word association test, an adjective check list, and psychophysiological responsiveness, recovery, and generalization testing. It was predicted that the mother-reared children would display greater maladjustment on the various measures than would the reared-apart children. The results failed to support the hypothesis. Those indices which discriminated between the groups at the five per cent level of significance indicated that: (a) the mother-reared children were more asocial in the classroom setting and withdrawn in general, and were also relatively unresponsive to social rewards; (b) the reared-apart children were more easily overtly upset or irritated, and displayed greater psychophysiological responsiveness to stress. These differences were interpreted within the context of an approach versus avoidance classification of orientations to the environment. The mother-reared children were considered to be avoidance oriented, and the reared-apart children approach oriented. It was concluded that rearing by a schizophrenic mother may have less to do with the child's level of adjustment than with the direction of its basic orientation to the world.