Assessment of the impact of the classroom environment and family environment on mental health in school children

1 Self-Concept and Significant others in relation to MentalHealth Davidson and Land (1960) found significant correlations between the self-concept of children and their perceptions of their teacher's feelings towards them. Dorothy Kipnis (1961) stressed the importance of friends in self-concepts. He tested students living in a dormitory and found that those who perceived their best friends to be relatively unlike themselves tended to change their self-evaluations during the sixweeks of the study so that the differences between themselves and their friends were smaller. According to Purkey W.W. (1970) self-concept first emerges in the context of the family as the ground child learns to view him-or herself as his or her parents view him of her. He stressed that the importance of parents for self-concepts continuous through adolescence rather than declining markedly. 1.1.2 Implications of Self-Concept in determining Mental-Health An analysis of 104 hospitalized psychotics by Wittenbom (1951) revealed that extremely high levels of self-esteem (exaggeration of ability and well being and grandiose notions of oneself) as well as extremely low levels of self-esteem (self-derogation, feeling of helplessness) were clearly factors associated with psychosis. A group of 79 well-acquainted college students took a series of personality tests designed to measure each subjects self-concept, and