Psychosocial health is defined as the ability to engage both the mental and social facets of a person’s life, and looking at these in terms of the effect they have on their emotional and mental growth. It is also referred to as the complete and stable state of physical and emotional wellbeing and is mainly experienced in young children who are still growing.
This is because in their formative years, children pick out their virtues from the society, the people around them, their environment and what they are exposed to in their daily lives. These set the parameters between good and bad, and what norms are encouraged in the society and what they should pick from the society; hence they adopt the principles that help them grow through life.
The mental state of people also stems from this stage, in that in general, people whose mental states are on form are able to handle issues however big with moderation. They look at situations around them from a positive perspective and this outlook in most cases gives them a relaxed mindset when they tackle the issues around them.
These people, in most cases had real positive upbringing, their guardians took time to teach them what they knew about life hence are generally positive about things around them. Their relaxed and composed physique creates around them an attraction of people of almost all facets, and their social circle tends to be too big, as in they have very many friends and people that relate to them.
The other group of personality that is different from the positive minded people is the unstable characters. They have a tendency to react negatively to the situations they are exposed to in life, and as such they act irrationally. Irrationality in thought and general judgment is evidence to poor psychosocial health, this is factored in the type of upbringing an individual had. These people tend to have confined or very limited social lives and are mostly wary about what other people think of them, majorly the negative aspect of their lives.
Sometimes it is the experiences they go through that make them react this way, but it’s mostly rooted in their subconscious mind, and they can barely do anything about it. Our case study revolves around Mr. and Mrs. Carters family, the degree to which they nurture the virtues in which they raise their family of three children and the parent-children relationship in the home compared to their own lifestyles’, also in their formative years.
This is in respect to the accepted standards of the preferred psychosocial health, which includes: Having a good feeling towards oneself, a feeling of easiness and contentment when with other people, the ability to have control over one’s emotions (In terms of tension and anxiety), keeping around an optimistic attitude about oneself, being grateful for the small things in life, setting goals and working towards achieving them fully and to admire and appreciate the beauty that nature holds.
Mr. Carter’s family is composed of three children with very different characters. Their children are Chrystal, who happens to be sixteen years old and is the eldest of the three children in the family. Others are Tracey, 11 and Roy Jr, 9 years. The couple really loves their children and they happen to be a closely knit family, they want them to grow up to be disciplined and straight members of the society.
Chrystal has undergone some traumatizing experience in life, first being raped by a non-family member. She gets into an argument with her parents and her father ends up abusing her verbally while her mother hits her with a broom.
Though she had no intention of reporting the matter to the authorities, she only shared it with her counselor at school in confidence. The counselor stepped overboard and reported the matter to the police who arrest and incarcerate her parents. With their parents in prison, Chrystal and her other siblings are placed under the care of their grandparents for four good days.
These are the same parents who provided their parents with the weak background when they were abusing drugs and neglecting their parental duties. After their parents were released from prison, Chrystal’s siblings went back to their parents’ care, while she remained with her grandparents for four months while the parents and other children underwent observation from a protective service worker who would testify in court the following month to determine the course of action to be followed.
In his report and analysis, the protective service employee tables her report acknowledging the fact that the Carters are a very strong family unit who love and cherish what they have between them. He goes deeper to assess the relationship between the parents and their grandparents, and the children to the parents.
Mr. Carter complains of his parent’s misconduct in his upbringing, saying he barely took care of him, his mother spent more time partying than taking care of her family, so Mr. Carter took care of the family, and he was barely eight years old.
On the other hand, Mrs. Carter also had issues with her upbringing. She was time and time again physically abused and was molested by her own brother at the age of fourteen. Her father took alcohol and her mother was weak, so there was a leadership vacuum in the family as much as the parents had been around. He also observes that they are open to counseling and understand their roles as parents in the home.
Though they do not have government support, they work almost always but manage to spend quality time with their children. Other glaring issues in the family are the unresolved cases, like Chrystal was raped the previous summer. No person had been arrested in connection to the case, yet the family rarely talks about this incident. The father blames the mother about this, he alludes that the mother was the cause of this incident.
The other case is that of Roy Jr., who happens to be suspected of having a condition called ADHD (Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). This is a situation which affects the child’s ability to concentrate and remain focused over long periods of time (Young, 31). The respect the children showed to the mother has drastically reduced ever since she went to prison.
The family and the children are being raised from where Mr. Carter grew up. It is a three bed-roomed public housing apartment in which they have stayed in for the seventeen years they have been together. Mr. Carter’s mother, in her sixties, still lives in the same apartment. The neighborhood is not so safe and people who peddle drugs just walk about the building, as a result of which there is frequent police patrol and many undercover police on the ground to provide safety.
Surveillance systems are also in place, the walls have graffiti on them and the streets are very much littered with garbage. Social activities are prepared and catered for financially by a tenant association, and they have a notion about their surrounding that once got into their own house, they need not to get out because the police, whose presence was always heavy, could patrol and offer the security.
The society with which these children are raised is not straight. So much needs to be done to ensure that Mr. Carter’s family grows up adherent to the right norms in their society. However much he and his wife have tried to bring up a family anybody would adore, there are some problems that are happening to the children that they may find so hard to let go.
Chrystal, having been molested has lost much of her self-esteem and trust in the people around her, much so the fact that the person who committed the beastly act is still at large. She is so insecure that the only person she feels comfortable talking to is neither a friend nor her age mate, but her counselor at school. In the long run, if anything happened to her counseling she would develop irrationality and her perspective towards some things in life like men would be so negative.
The other problem in this case is that the parents are bringing up their children in a drug infested area. Drug peddlers as well as consumers ply their trade within the vicinity, at their ages the children would grow to find it so normal to use the drugs because they have grown up watching people use them. It would also be easier to have their peers influence them to abuse the substances. The solution to this would be to move out of that neighborhood and find a more conducive and clean environment within which to bring up their children.
Works Cited
Young, Bryan. Handbook of clinical neurology: Disorders of consciousness. Volume 90. NY: New York university press. 2007