Depth Interview IV. General Adjustment, Mental Health and Childhood Experiences

Abstract

The significance of childhood experiences for later mental health and adjustment has long been recognized. It also comes to the foreground in findings regarding the relations between present general adjustment and mental health of immigrants and a score of variables on childhood experiences. The love relationship to the father appears to be related to general adjustment, i.e. the preponderantly active, creative adjustment to society, not quite significantly through computation of Chi-square, but clearly through comparison of the distribution of the percentages. This gains additional weight from the finding that the at-home feeling in the Ulpan, a more passive adjustment to a closed, protective environment, is in the same way related to the love relationship to the mother. Ambivalent child-parent relationships appear to be related to worse mental health as well as to worse general adjustment. Separation in childhood, after the age of three years, is related to mental health as well as to general adjustment and to the at-home feeling in the Ulpan. The death of a parent, when compensated by a proper parent substitute, is, remarkably enough, related to better general adjustment and not to mental health. Education, as qualified in this research, is related to mental health and psychosomatic complaints. Socio-economic conditions in childhood appear to be related only to general adjustment. These and other relations are discussed in Chapter Ten.