| With the rising of the divorce rate, the number of single-parental children is increasing rapidly. Compared with the children in complete families, single-parental children have more emotional and behavioral problems, especially the relationship problem. The main aspect of the children’s interpersonal relationship is the peer relations. The peer interaction has important influence to the children’s abilities of the social development, which plays a vital role in the children’s abilities and skills of the social communication, adaptation and the personality formation. The transition from childhood to adolescence stage is the period from10 to 12 years old, which is also the critical period for the character formation. Children in this age period are easily affected by the peer relationship, which means that if the peer relation is poor, it will generate negative affects to the children’s physical and mental health to a large degree.The self-concept and social anxiety are important aspects of children’s peer relationships.The first study is to explore the relationship among the self-concept, social anxiety and peer relations, which includes the research to 1438 experimental subjects who are 10-12 years old,through the methods of the Piers-Harris Children’s self-concept Scale, Social Anxiety Scale for Children, and Peer-Nominated Inventory. The research findings show that:(1) there is a close correlation among the peer relations, self- concept and social anxiety, and the social anxiety is the intermediate variable between the self-concept and peer relations;(2) the self-concept has a significant positive predicting effect on peer relations, otherwise the social anxiety generates a negative predicting effect on peer relations;(3) the self-concept level of single-parental children is obviously below the overall average, meanwhile their social anxiety is higher and peer relations are worse than the overall average.The second study further confirms the conclusion in the first study from the aspect of the individual behavior, such as the eye movement processing. The subjects are required to watch the pictures of social scenes and non-social scenes at the same time, which aims to explore that if there are some attention biases among subjects with different social anxiety levels. The results are as below:(1) compared to the children with low social anxiety level, children withhigh level of social anxiety have shorter reaction time, longer fixation duration and more fixation counts to particular scenes, especially the social scenes;(2) the single-parental children’s response to the social scene and the non-social scene is more sensitive than children from ordinary family.In order to explore the intervention situation of the group sandplay to peer relations of single-parental children, the third study selected 72 single-parental children with low self-concept scores, high social anxiety scores and poor peer-relationships, according to the peer group pretest and posttest method. These children are randomly divided into three groups,the sandplay group, the psychological consulting group and the normal control group, with each group of 24 children. The children in sandplay group are equally divided into 4 small groups to accept the weekly group sandplay intervention for total 8 times; and the children in the psychological counseling group are also divided into 4 groups to take the weekly psychological counseling intervention for 8 times. Meanwhile, there is no extra measure for the normal control group. This study reveals that: the sandplay therapy could enhance children’s self-concept, reduce their social anxiety, and effectively improve children’s peer relations.In conclusion, there is a close relationship among the children’s peer relations,self-concepts and the social anxiety, and the social anxiety plays as the moderator in this relationship. To a large extent, the group sandplay therapy could enhance children’s self-concept, relieve their social anxiety, and improve their peer relations. |
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