Socialization and the Parent - Child Relationship1

To those who deal with parents, it often seems that by the time a theory has been put into actual practice by parents, it is no longer accepted. We often wish that some of the publicized methods had been tested in real life situations before being advocated so strongly. While it is true that practice may lag a generation or two behind theories of child development, there is a section of the culture, an avant garde, which is much quicker to learn about and adopt the newer scientific opinions. There are intellectual parents who experiment with such methods as self-demand schedule, raising babies in boxes, release of repressions in play or the use of group decisions in determining family policy within a few years of the time the ideas were first discussed in scientific literature. This intellectual