[Parental relationship from the perspectives of children, adolescents and clinicians. Development and clinical validation of the Parental-Representation-Screening-Questionnaire (PRSQ)]. / Elternbeziehung aus Sicht von Kindern, Jugendlichen und Klinikern. Entwicklung und klinische Validierung des Elternbild-Fragebogens (EBF-KJ).

The Parental-Representation-Screening-Questionnaire (PRSQ) is a new instrument designed to asses how children and adolescents evaluate their relationship with their parents. The aim of the questionnaire is to assess those aspects in the child-parent relationship that are crucial for a psychopathological risk. Conceptually, the PRSQ is based on cognitive self theory and systemic family theory. The PRSQ consists of 8 scales (36 items) for each parent: "freedom of decision", "emotional burden by the parents", "fears / overprotection", "conflict", "hostility / indifference", "aid for the parents", "punishment", and "support from the parents''. A clinic-referred consecutive sample of 152 patients of a Berlin child and adolescent psychiatry, aged 10 to 18 years, were surveyed. Adverse educational and psychosocial family factors were assessed by clinicians according to the fifths axis of the multiaxial classification system (MAS, Dilling et al. 2000). The internal reliability for 13 of the 16 scales ranges from .90 to .72. Factor analyses confirmed the factorial independence of six of the eight scales separately for mother and father. Moreover, adolescent girls reported significantly worse relations to both parents on five of the 16 scales than boys. Furthermore we found concordant correlations with the clinician's diagnosis of adverse educational and psychosocial family situations. The present results confirm the PRSQ as an economic and discriminating instrument to assess the representation of parent-child relation for clinical and for scientific purposes.

Emotional availability in infant psychiatry.

In a child psychiatric population, 68 mother-child pairs were observed, with children ranging in age from 6 weeks to 3 years 10 months. The children were diagnosed using the Zero to Three DC 0-3 guidelines (Zero-to-Three, 1998). Each dyad also was rated in terms of the intensity of recommended therapeutic measures upon intake at our clinic. Following videotaping of parent-child interactions, the dyads were rated for emotional availability using the Emotional Availability Scales (EAS; Biringen, Robinson, & Emde, 1998). The group with feeding disorders showed the lowest EAS ratings. The group with regulation disorders (sleeping and crying disorders) had the highest ratings followed by the group with externalizing disorders (motor disorganized and/or aggressive behavior) and attachment disorders. Further, the lower the EAS ratings, the higher the intensity of recommended treatments for the family. These findings indicate the importance of standardized observing of parent-child interactions in infant psychiatric disorders. Some clinical impressions regarding the work with the EAS also are described.