Adler's Personality Theory & Child Rearing Practices

Adler's General Personality Theory: A Synopsis

Pervin (1992) reports that the personality theory of Alfred Adler, unlike the personality theory of Sigmund Freud, assigned sexual urges a secondary role in the dynamics of personality. Instead, Adler emphasized the superiority strivings of individuals with behavior being characterized as goal-directed and consciously chosen rather than driven and pre-determined by biological urges or the unconscious mind. Further, Adler called attention to the influence that an individual's immediate social environment had on his or her behavior and the contribution of this environment to the development of personality.

In therapy, Adler emphasized childhood recollections solely for clues to the client's present style of life as it related to dealing with feelings of inferiority resulting from childhood experiences (Pervin, 1992). For example, some individuals will strive to overcome childhood feelings of inferiority in a productive goal-oriented manner while others will seek sympathy, drifting over to apathy, dependency and "uselessness." Adler's perspective, Pervin (1992) states, focused on an active interventionist approach with clients urging them to replace thei

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session. Approximately 43 of these parents were posttested after the fourth session and 32 were posttested after the sixth session. A multivariate analysis of variance was used to compare the change in scores made by the experimental group parents to the scores of untrained parents in three control groups. Results showed that parents tested after four weeks had made significantly greater gains on the AFTC-II and the CRPS than the controls. The positive findings observed for Adlerian parent education programs were successfully replicated in continuing research---so much so that today such programs are effectively utilized in many other countries. For example, Carmack and Carmack (1994) described the presentation of parental education programs based on Adlerian parental education in Vladivostok, Russia, before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Parental education workshops provided to Russians included helping parents to understand the goals of children's misbehavior, and emphasized the use of encouragement to build children's self-esteem. The workshops also focused on creating a system of natural and logical consequences for discipline. Evaluative data collected on the workshops showed that after initial hesitation,
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Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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