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Mental Illness: The Role Of Conformity In Children

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Introduction
When children are first conceived, society holds the expectation that each parent be in an average mental state so as to care for the infant, as they have many needs and require lots of care. Further, in a perfect world, this mental homeostasis would be maintained as the infant grows into childhood and continues into adolescence in order to best carry out their parental responsibilities. A parent has the duty to remain stable mentally and physically in order to sustain and enrich another life. However, this is most certainly not the case for every family. Many children grow up with one or more parents who at some point suffer from mental illness. This causes implications on the child’s development. These implications can include mental, physical, and social problems. This raises the question: will these children behave differently in a social setting than their peers? How might their home-life affect their conformity?
I intend to research how children of …show more content…

This includes single mothers and single fathers, as well as step-mothers and step-fathers. Then, an experiment on conformity would be performed on a child in a randomly sampled group of children of the same age. The child in this group would have one or more mentally ill parents. The same experiment would be performed but this time, the subject would be a child with mentally stable parents. Said experiment would aim to place the subject in a controlled setting that may or may not prompt them to conform to their peers. An experiment such as the Solomon Asch experiment (1951) may be authorized. Experiments would be conducted with children of various genders and ages. This method would permit me to isolate specific cases and calculate a possible

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