Publications

Family, School and School Violence.

Ochoa, GM.

Electronic Magazine of Motivation and Emotion

2009

Research

Spanish

English

School bullying

This publication considers that family and school are the main scenarios where everyday lives of children and teenagers are developed and, as such, both contexts are essential for their proper development and settlement. According to the article, students between 10 and 16 years old spent most of their time at home or in school, which implies, in turn, a long coexistence with family members or caretakers, peers and teachers. All of them can contribute with unique opportunities for the learning and training of social skills and the experience of positive relationships, but also can establish the perfect landscape to fuel expressions of emotional discomfort and violent behavior.
Throughout the article, the double role of family and school, as both risk and protection contexts when facing the development of problems of violent behavior during adolescence, is paid close attention. In particular, they focus in analyzing the role that different styles of family socializing and the quality of the parent-children communication play in the origin and permanence of these problems. Moreover, they supply a synthesis of those school aspects that different recent studies have pointed out as fundamental explanatory factors of violent behavior. First, it focuses on doing a brief presentation of the family and its relationship with school context; and then in the second part, it comments, more in depth, how both scenarios can contribute to the explanation of the children's behavior.

The article mainly highlights the importance that family has in the creation and promotion of violent behavior of the children, which is based in the different parental styles and practices. It points out, among others, the importance of family-school relationships, relevant factors in the family context, family socializing patters or communication dynamics or family conflict, always focusing in the fact that the formation of the education that children receive implicitly or explicitly is the one that they will carry out with other people, especially with their peers.
Apart from this, they point out, although in a less relevant way, other influential elements in the formation of violent behavior, such as several important factors in the school scenario, features of the school or their own relationships with teachers and peers.
These two aspects are decisive for the formation of a child, as they are the contexts where they spend most of their time, and because they are their closest context, it is where they get along and socialize. Good practices in these fields favor the correct schooling of the students, for this, it is important the contribution of these kind of articles for the School Safety Net Project, as a good formation could prevent a great number of violent behavior cases or bullying/cyberbullying among young students, one of the main reasons of school absenteeism.

Rosario del Rey

University of Seville

Researcher