Parent-Child Separation

Parent-Child Separation: Psychosocial Effects on Development is an abstracted bibliography dealing with the consequences of parental separation and deprivation on the developing child and adolescent. We were interested in investigating the literature pertaining to the absence of a parent for reasons other than parental death. Main topics included were maternal or paternal absence due to desertion, military duty, imprisonment, parental institutionalization and divorce. Restricted parenting articles were included when they dealt with maternal or paternal inattention, rather than physical abuse. Particular problems with being a single parent were viewed from the perspective of child development. Because of the wealth of literature available in this area it became necessary to exclude topics such as laboratory studies dealing with temporary separation, normative attachment studies, effects of maternal employment, child abuse, child institutionalization and the like. Other related topics will be the subject of forthcoming books. These include the effect of parental death on the child and problems of childhood hospitali­ zation. In Parent-Child Separation each of the 690 main references have abstracts which were derived from three main sources: Psycho­ logical Abstracts, author-supplied abstracts and those written by the authors of this book. In compiling this book it became neces­ sary, because of size limitations, to focus on articles published after 1960. However, several pre-1960 articles and books were im­ portant from a historical perspective and are included in a separate section marked "Historical References. " These represent important earlier contributions to this vast subject area.