THE RELATION BETWEEN PRESCHOOLERS’ QUALITY FAMILY TIME AND THEIR LEVEL OF SOCIAL INTERACTION SKILLS

Abstract

The existing curriculum gives family, respectively parents, the role of active partners in the children’s education. For a long time, it was believed that educational institutions carry full responsibility for a child’s education, the family being regarded as the beneficiary of the schools’ activity. But, the truth is that family cannot be separated from the school’s educational context. The role of parents does not stop when the child is admitted to the educational institution, but it changes in terms of approaching the child, given the latter’s new status and in full agreement with what happens in the educational environment. The role of parents in building social interaction skills at a child may be identified in terms of cause, as well as effect. On the one hand, this means that family interaction defines a child’s social interaction potential and, on the other hand, a child’s general developmental state is indicative, to a certain extent, of the family background. In this paper, we shall try to identify the relevance of quality time spent by the child in the middle of his/ her family and the child’s social interaction skills. The methods we have used are the open-ended questionnaire and observation.

Key words: active educational partner, preschoolers, quality family time, social interaction skills

JIPED_17_1_2013_3