Functional Psychological Literacy of Parents and Teachers as a Condition of Effective Communication with a Child

The article provides a transcript of the speeches of the speakers of the Round Table "Functional psychological literacy of parents and teachers as a condition for building effective communication with a child", held at the Moscow State University of Psychological and Education on April 25, 2023. The Round Table addressed the problems of modern "psychology for life": the formation of functional psychological literacy of school teachers and parents in the sphere of communication and interaction with children. The speeches of the speakers of the Round Table were devoted to modern ideas about psychological literacy in psychology; approaches and researches in the field of formation of psychological literacy within the systems "teacher-pupil", "parent-child"; formation of functional psychological literacy of school teachers in communication with pupils; knowledge, skills, abilities of parents in interaction with a child; risk factors in the development of functional psychological literacy in communication and interaction with a child of parents and teachers in the sphere of communication and interaction with a child. Video recording of the speeches is given on the official video channel of PsyJournals.ru.

Introduction

At present, there is a public demand for improving the quality of the education and upbringing of future generations of Russian society. On the pages of the journal "Psychological Science and Education" we have already raised a question how to answer to this demand by developing a critical scientific literacy in the  flow of information containing contradictory scientific data and expert opinions. It’s  one of the aspects of improving the quality of education and upbringing, another one is the strengthening correlation between different types of  learning motivation and developing the level of scientific literacy [23; 40]. Another important condition for the realization of the demand is the formation of functional psychological literacy of the participants of educational and upbringing processes. On the 25th of April 2023, there was a round table Functional Psychological Literacy of Parents and Teachers as a Condition for Building Effective Communication with a Child, its purpose was to discuss modern ideas about psychological literacy, approaches and technologies for  the formation of psychological literacy within the "teacher-child", "parent-child" systems. The round table was organized by the Moscow State University of Psychology and Education and the editorial board of the journal Psychological Science and Education. The speakers of the round table were specialists from different universities and research centers, such as MSU, MSUPE, PI RAE, MHRC(N.N. Avdeeva, A.D. Andreeva, V.K. Zaretskii, S.N. Enikolopov, I.A. Burlakova, E.I. Zakharova, T.A. Poskakalova, Y.A. Kochetova). We present the results of the discussion in the format of a transcript of the participants' speeches. The video recording of the speeches is available on the official YouTube channel of the portal of psychological publications PsyJournals.ru.

The Concept of Functional Literacy: Stages of Study[1]

Functional literacy is "a person's ability to use knowledge acquired during life to solve a wide range of life tasks in various spheres of human activity, communication and social relations" [43, p. 35]. [43, с. 35]. Such a definition is consonant with the one used in the PISA Program of International Comparative Study.

Currently, the following types of functional literacy are being developed: reading, mathematical, scientific, financial literacy; global competencies and creative thinking. It should be noted that psychological literacy itself is not singled out as a component of functional literacy.

Summarizing various researches on types of functional literacy, we found that the components of functional literacy are quite diverse. They include: a knowledge of information, rules, principles; the assimilation of general concepts and skills that form the cognitive basis for solving standard tasks in various spheres of life; the ability to adapt to a changing world, to solve conflicts, to work with information, to conduct business correspondence; the ability to apply the rules of personal safety in life. It draws attention to the fact that all these  heterogeneous components are oriented towards the improvement of human functioning in the  society.

The concept of the Functional Literacy of Schoolchildren according  to the Russian Federal State Educational Standard is more defined and is more about the ability to apply knowledge and skills in practical life situations. The Russian Federal State Standard currently includes functional literacy as reading, mathematical, scientific and financial literacy, creative thinking. In Russian pedagogy, the problems of functional literacy are developed at the conceptual, research and practical levels. At the same time, there is a sphere of psychological and pedagogical problems, research and methods, which has projections both in psychology and pedagogy, for example, in the field of creative thinking.

In Russian psychology, the problem of psychological literacy has been considered since the 90s of the XX century. For the first time the concept of psychological literacy was introduced by E.A. Klimov. He stressed that "psychological literacy is not reduced to the elements of the awareness of facts and dependencies characterizing the subjective world of a person, but assumes a specific educatedness of the personality and a certain mindset, orientation of the mind". Psychological literacy includes: the "soul-searching orientation" of thinking; an interest in the other; the possession of psychodiagnostic techniques, probing in the process of conversation [36; 61, p. 163].

In this period, psychological literacy is considered as an interpersonal space and a space of social relations, the perception of a person by a person within these interpersonal social relations.

At the next stage, psychological literacy is considered as a part of psychological culture. In turn, psychological culture acts as an integral part of the basic culture of personality, a systemic characteristic of a person, which allows him/her to effectively self-determine in society and self-realize in life, contributing to self-development and a successful social adaptation, a satisfaction with his/her own life. It includes literacy and competence in the psychological aspect of understanding the human essence, the inner world of a person and himself, personal  relations and behavior.

It should be noted that such an understanding of psychological culture has traces of the influence of humanistic psychology, popular in Russian psychology at that time. The new understanding of psychological culture emphasizes the possibility of self-determination in society, self-development, self-realization, life satisfaction. That is, from the zone of interpersonal relations and social context, psychological culture and related psychological literacy are shifted to the personality, self-development, understanding of oneself, one's inner world, human relations and behavior. This second focus came to be seen in terms of the necessity of education for the formation of psychological literacy.

As the next stage in the development of ideas about psychological literacy, it is possible to distinguish the psychological research of the last decades.

A number of works studied the psychological literacy of schoolchildren. A.V. Milekhin's research studied the relationship between psychological literacy and the socialization of senior schoolchildren [42]. In the work "Teaching psychology at school as a condition for the formation of the psychological literacy of students" [5], the operationalization of the concept of psychological literacy is presented, as well as empirical data characterizing the formation of the basics of psychological literacy at all stages of school education. A.M. Prikhozhan's work "Psychological literacy of junior schoolchildren as a condition for mastering universal learning actions" is devoted to the problem of forming empathy and decentration as universal learning actions in junior schoolchildren during psychology lessons in elementary school [47].

A number of studies considered psychological literacy in adult ages. Thus, in the work of O.V. Palchenko "Psychological sciences and psychological education as a resource for increasing the level of the psychological literacy of young people" the problem of the low level of psychological literacy of young people is described, the consequences and psychological causes of this phenomenon are determined on the basis of observations [45]. A.G. Busygina's work "Psychological competence (literacy) of students of pedagogical universities as the basis of the psychological health of a future teacher" reveals the problem of the meaning and essence of the development of students' psychological competence, which is the basis of professional training in higher education, within the framework of preserving the psychological health of the young generation [14]. So, certain steps have been made to show the significance of the psychological literacy of schoolchildren and university students for their success in learning, their socialization, and psychological health.

In foreign psychology, the development of the problem of psychological literacy in the training of undergraduate psychologists has been actively discussed in recent years in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic. It has been noted that for 50 years, leaders in the field of psychology have been calling for fundamental changes in the conduct of psychological research, psychological education, and engagement with society. The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that psychology should contribute more to the well-being of individuals, both generally and in the case of specific social groups.

Psychological literacy is seen as an integrative concept in psychology and as a pedagogical approach. Thus, current research points out that psychological literacy is a pedagogical approach that promotes the application of knowledge of psychology to social, ethical and cultural problems. It is suggested that it is necessary to seriously restructure the entirety of the psychological training of students, orienting them precisely towards "skills for life". Psychological literacy is considered the primary outcome of a bachelor's degree in psychology, and scholars are calling for more "psychologically literate" forms of summative assessment to reflect this outcome.

The Problem of Functional Psychological Literacy and the Professional Ethics of School Teachers[2]

The topic of my speech is "The problem of functional psychological literacy and the professional ethics of school teachers". We have a traditional socially desirable image of a school teacher, which assumes a good command of the subject knowledge, methodological and didactic means, a high level of general culture, pedagogical giftedness and a love for children. But, at the same time, it is always a big problem for me, because a pedagogue, a teacher is a mass profession, and the need for such professionals is very high, and therefore it seems to me that the effectiveness of their labor should not depend on such personal, such individual qualities as pedagogical giftedness and a love for children. Several years ago, in our Laboratory of the Scientific Foundations of Applied Child Psychology of the PI RAE, a series of empirical studies related to the study of attitudes of students and their parents towards various aspects of school life was conducted [6; 7; 8]. For example, high school students were offered a 45-item questionnaire about everyday school life. What do schoolchildren and their parents think a good school teacher should be like? Schoolchildren massively note that it is a teacher who knows his/her subject well and respects his/her students, does not allow himself/herself to humiliate someone who is weaker than him/her [8].

But parents' attitude towards a teacher, or rather, parents' social perception of what they expect from a teacher, studied using the method of P. Verges, turned out to be somewhat different [6]. The core of their social perception of a good teacher includes such qualities as an excellent knowledge of the subject, authority and high demandingness. That is, these are the qualities that a teacher must possess. It is good, of course, if he/she is patient, wise, kind, fair and attentive, and it is not necessary that he/she loves children. A love for children is on the periphery of parents' social perception of a teacher and is considered, in my opinion, as a stereotypical attribute of a teacher rather than a professionally valuable quality.

In our opinion, this suggests that the professional activity of a teacher today has lost its humanitarian content and is reduced mainly to the transfer of knowledge. And I remembered how, a few years ago, the banner of educating a competitive personality was raised high. Now it is less talked about, but I think it contributed to such a value transformation of ideas about the tasks and place of a teacher in children's life. The most important thing is that he knows the subject perfectly, is authoritative and demanding, and with everything else we, in general, are ready to put up with.

In the above-mentioned research it was shown what exactly schoolchildren dislike in a teacher [8].

They do not like it when the teacher explains badly, when he/she shouts, ridicules, has favorites and inspires fear. I will dwell on this very briefly, but I will dwell nonetheless. Poor explanations - such a dissatisfaction of children with the productivity of a school lesson has good reasons. For example, in one Moscow school it was explained to parents that now the teacher only "gives the topic", and its further mastering is the task of the pupil and his family. The high level of demand for tutor services is an equally alarming symptom of dysfunction in the school education system. If, earlier, parents of either low-achieving children or school graduates preparing to enter a higher education institution used to use these services, today, systematic tutoring of well-performing, highly motivated children of various ages has become the norm. Nowadays, it is no secret that a successful passing of current and final certification by students is a criterion of quality educational services provided by the school, but it is also no secret that this high rating of the school, which is calculated on the basis of these attestations and victories in subject olympiads, is largely achieved at by the work of tutors, which is provided for by the child's family. In our opinion, a critical substitution of values for the teaching profession has taken place. For a teacher, it has become important not what he or she has taught a child, what knowledge and skills he or she has given him or her, but what results he or she has shown at various certification events.

We see that no less serious problem is the lack of mastery of the basics of pedagogical ethics by many teachers, or, more precisely, their lack of understanding of which of the methods of pedagogical influence they use can be regarded as forms of psychological violence. We can see that 63% of schoolchildren surveyed are accustomed to teacher's shouting and swearing, 68% are sure that a teacher can always use jokes, threats or mockery to put in their place a pupil who disturbs or dislikes him, and 71% of respondents talk about teacher's favorites. In principle, the professional ethics of a teacher do not forbid him/her to feel sympathy, have a good attitude, to support some students, but it is important that a good attitude does not turn into favoritism. The line here is very thin, very shaky. The largest percentage - 80.1% of pupils say that they are afraid of teachers, these are pupils from Moscow and regions.

How can this situation be changed? In my opinion, there are two possible ways. Firstly, the development of psychological literacy, the improvement of the psychological culture of teachers and, secondly, the formation of professional pedagogical ethics.

The psychological literacy of a professional does not come about by itself, simply from work experience or professional development courses. Training in a pedagogical university is aimed at students mastering the content of the subject he will teach, the methodology, didactics, a general course of pedagogy and psychology. The knowledge of psychology they receive is practically inapplicable in everyday pedagogical practice, it lives in the textbook in a chemically pure form, and the psychological phenomena described in it are poorly recognized in the individual behavior of schoolchildren and the teachers themselves. There is also a very important point related to the fact that, in schools today, there are quite a lot of people working without basic pedagogical education, people who have received a higher technical, natural science or humanitarian education. They have gone through the teacher retraining system, passed exams, but nevertheless they are non-professional teachers.

It is important to understand that functional psychological literacy implies not only the knowledge of psychological laws, phenomena and terms, but also a conscious and arbitrary ability to apply this knowledge in solving real life problems. Psychological literacy should be considered as a professional competency of a teacher, for the development of which it is necessary to create special conditions.

Apparently, the psychological education of future teachers should be aimed not so much at psychological enlightenment as at the formation of psychological literacy. The development of functional psychological literacy creates prerequisites for the formation of the psychological culture of a personality as a part of general culture. The development of a theoretical and practical course, including age and educational psychology, age social psychology, personality psychology, and elements of defectology, is not a matter of the near future.

It seems more realistic to form, at least at the first stage, professional pedagogical ethics, because the ignorance of the basics of professional ethics and psychological unculturedness is the weakest link in the training of future teachers. Unfortunately, today, psychological and even sometimes physical violence against children is no longer rare. Teachers insult and humiliate children, intimidate them, threaten them, ridicule their mistakes and blunders, refuse to help them master difficult learning skills, devalue their efforts, and appeal to the socio-cultural and national characteristics of the child and his/her family. But psychological violence is not necessarily expressed in such harsh forms; it can also manifest itself in the form of incorrect, tactless questions, in the form of the disclosure of test results or medical information. I have met teachers in Moscow schools who were terribly proud of how they humiliated a child, how they wittily put them in their place. These teachers knew their subject well and were generally not bad people, but such was their understanding of their pedagogical giftedness.

Parents do not remain in debt and aggravate the conflict with the teacher, fueling it with their passion and irrepressible desire to punish the teacher. They use recording devices, and the meticulous questioning of the child about the details of each school day, the meticulous study of the teacher's grades and remarks. For some parents, this struggle becomes the meaning of life, a form of social activity, and the child becomes a tool of this full-scale war. While "protecting" their child from a demanding teacher, such parents are actually afraid to admit their own educational and parental failure, and this self-protection becomes another reason for an irreconcilable struggle with the teacher.

The professionalism of a teacher is to understand the difference between psychological violence against a child and the pedagogically competent, justified, effective methods of pedagogical influence. Due to the age-related weakness of the child's arbitrary mental processes, volitional behavior and insufficiently motivated learning activities, education and upbringing cannot take place without the use of methods of pedagogical coercion by teachers and educators. School education cannot be based on the child's direct interest in the subject matter alone, as it inevitably contains many routine, uninteresting, but compulsory forms and types of work. The teacher's arsenal includes many professional means and methods of influencing the pupil, including marks, verbal reprimands, discussions with parents, disciplinary penalties, and various forms of individual encouragement, support and approval.

In addition to improving the psychological literacy of teachers and their firm grasp of the code of ethics, there is a need for a system of administrative support for the very measures of pedagogical coercion that can be used by the teacher to regulate relations with the child's family. This system should be based on the provisions of the Family Code of the Russian Federation and the Federal Law "On Education in the Russian Federation" that parents have a priority right to the education and upbringing of their children over all other persons and are obliged to ensure that their children receive a general education.

This disposition has developed only in recent years as a result of a significant redistribution of responsibility between the family and the school. Many generations of Russian parents have been accustomed to a form of a civil contract such as "the family helps the school to teach and educate the children". This existed for many long years, under this form of civil contract parents were in agreement with many harsh forms of influence on the child, which were traditional for the school. In modern society, at the initiative of the state, this contract has been radically changed, now the responsibility for the education and upbringing of children lies primarily on the parents themselves, and "the school helps the family to teach and bring up children" [7].

What can this look like in practice?

For example, in Danish schools the teacher does not scold the child for having not done his/her homework, but simply notes that the assignments are not completed. Parents know that this is their area of responsibility, and a certain number of such marks in the school logbook is a reason for the school to contact social services: after all, the parent is not fulfilling his/her direct duties well. In schools in Germany or the USA, a pupil who misses several lessons, even for a good reason, may not be certified for a certain academic period. These rules have nothing to do with the personal relations between students and teachers, they do not require special pedagogical talent and insight, they just work and help adults to cultivate in children a sense of personal responsibility for the consequences of their behavior. Our students also know that failing to pass the exam session on time will lead to expulsion from the university, and this helps a little to increase their academic motivation, because even though many believe that they have chosen a profession that they are interested in, nevertheless, studying is studying, it is not always so exciting.

Today, our school teacher has no such tools. Unfortunately, the mechanisms of the practical implementation of the new civil contract have not yet been developed, so the relationship between the two most important social institutions – the family and the school - is transitional, if not conflictual [7].

Summing up my speech, I would like to emphasize that the development of teachers' functional psychological literacy and their mastery of professional ethics are two equal approaches to solving the problem of productive interaction between the participants of the educational process. Psychological literacy implies a conscious and arbitrary application of psychological knowledge to the solution of a specific problem situation. Pedagogical ethics requires the same conscious and arbitrary observance of the norms of behavior corresponding to the requirements of the profession. In pedagogy, as in any mass sphere of activity, people come with different degrees of professional giftedness, with a different potential of personal development. Interest in psychological knowledge, the desire to competently apply it in their work can be considered as a sign of pedagogical giftedness, the desire for the self-improvement of professional skills. The observance of pedagogical ethics is an indicator of a teacher's conscientious attitude to his/her labor duties, evidence of his/her professional culture. It seems that both "technologies" can be considered as professional competencies of the teacher, the possession of which (or of one of them) is necessary for creating a favorable educational environment, ensuring the psychological well-being of children, preventing the professional burnout of teachers. The formation of these competencies should become a significant direction of professional pedagogical education, since today they are formed spontaneously.

About the Functional Literacy of Parents: How to Help a Child to Overcome Learning Difficulties[3]

The Department of Individual and Group Psychotherapy of the Faculty of Counselling and Clinical Psychology of the MSUPE has been working for 25 years in the field of the psychological and pedagogical assistance in overcoming learning difficulties, which promotes development. Within the framework of this practice of providing psychological and pedagogical assistance in overcoming learning difficulties, we are developing a direction that we call the reflective activity-based approach to providing such assistance.

Since some time ago, we began to consider it as a direction within the framework of cultural-historical psychology, when we realized how well our practice fits in with the basic ideas formulated by L.S. Vygotsky about the connection between learning and development. Since the adult's help to the child is seen, within the framework of cultural-historical psychology, as a very important moment of their interaction, we would like to propose to consider the skill or ability to provide effective help as an essential component of the parent's functional literacy.

I would like to show the significance of the situation of a child's encounter with a learning difficulty for his or her development and to justify this from the perspective of cultural-historical psychology; to justify, accordingly, the significance of the adult's help to the child in overcoming learning difficulties precisely in terms of the role this help plays or can play for the child's development. This is not so unambiguous. Accordingly, we would like to familiarize the participants with the perceptions of the types of teachers’ and parental help to the child that have been identified in our empirical studies conducted at the MSUPE. The main types of help were identified in these studies, and I will try to show, based on the work of, first and foremost, Antonina Alexandrovna Ageeva - on her master's thesis, how these types of help, which are identified in empirical research, can be evaluated in terms of effectiveness according to the criterion of developmental assistance [28].

In this study, the relationship between learning and development is as follows: there is a learning activity, there are learning difficulties, the child receives some help, and we seek to understand to what extent this help promotes development. We will consider the ability to provide developmentally appropriate help as an essential component of the functional psychological literacy of both the parent and teacher. But today we are talking about the functional literacy of parents. Based on the results of our research, we will try to justify the great importance of the problem that relates to the training of teachers and parents in the effective ways of helping children to overcome learning difficulties.

As I have already mentioned, the reflective activity-based approach to helping children overcome learning difficulties is seen as a trend in cultural-historical psychology, as a practice based on its main provisions.

We have chosen 12 positions of L.S. Vygotsky from his cultural-historical psychology of development, which are important for understanding the meaning of the situation of a child's encounter with learning difficulties. It is a certain unit of a developmental step that can be taken when confronted with an error or difficulty. Firstly, L.S. Vygotsky said that learning difficulties are inevitable. Learning activity is organized in such a way that "a child constantly has to punch above their weight", i.e. to do what he does not yet know how to do [18]. It is clear that if a child does what he/she does not know how to do, mistakes and difficulties are inevitable. At the same time, most teachers, parents and pupils treat mistakes and difficulties negatively. How can one have a negative attitude towards something that is inevitable and natural? There is a contradiction here, which also has to do with psychological literacy. Learning leads to development precisely through overcoming learning difficulties. That is, by overcoming difficulties, the child develops. A very interesting phrase that was also found in Vygotsky’s work, but it is in a different context, as he understands the word "overcome". With his inherent sensitivity to language, he writes that to overcome is to lean on, to push back and then one can take a step forward [19], and in this sense, difficulty is a support for a step in development.

Vygotsky says that development takes place in cooperation between a child and an adult. He does not say this immediately, he starts using the word "cooperation" about a year before his death, somewhere from March 1933 [20]. Before that he used other words, but from that time, the last year of his life, he spoke exclusively of co-operation and sometimes of guidance. He talked about the fact that development takes place when co-operation takes place in the zone of proximal development and that the zone of proximal development has boundaries. He said that when a child does what he knows how to do, he is not developing. But obviously there is still some boundary where a child cannot co-operate with an adult, he doesn't directly point to it, but he hints that it exists. And a very important thesis is that the co-operation must be conscious. In his notebooks, he has this phrase: "Awareness=generalization=mastering=communication with oneself=self-consciousness" [21]. That is, he attached great importance to mindfulness.

And he talked about the fact that the concept of ZPD can be extended to the personality as a whole, to consider it very broadly, not only in terms of intellectual development. Finally, in "Thinking and Speech" he writes that learning can be arranged in such a way that "one step in learning can mean 100 steps in development" [19, p. 230], and he, especially when discussing working with children who have developmental peculiarities and abnormalities, says that it is important to build on the child's resource. Because it is impossible to rely on what they do not have. This applies to learning in general, but we are talking about the situation when a child encounters a learning difficulty. All these 12 positions have a direct relation to what an event is for a child, for his/her life, when he/she encounters a learning difficulty, and how to help him/her.

We have allowed ourselves to make some additions to these theses of Vygotsky within the framework of our practice of helping children overcome learning difficulties by means of the reflective activity-based approach: we will present Vygotsky's positions on the left, and on the right how we interpret them within the framework of our practice of help. Learning leads to development. This means that by helping to overcome learning difficulties, development can be promoted. To overcome means to lean on, to push back, and to take a step forward. So, a mistake or difficulty is the starting point for help. A child cannot do something on his own, so he must be helped to do it. The main questions here are what exactly he cannot do and what kind of help he needs. The answers to these questions are not always obvious.

For us, co-operation became the basis for formulating the thesis about the child's subject position as the most important moment of interaction between a child and an adult. The subject position of the child means that he/she is both the subject of carrying out his/her activity, for example, overcoming learning difficulties, and of its comprehension, i.e., reflection [30]. That is, subjectivity has two meanings; here we rely on the work of Yuri Viktorovich Zaretskii, who identified two necessary components of the subject position: activity and awareness [30].

From the concept of the zone of proximal development follows the requirement to understand and be able to act within the boundaries of this zone. The lower boundary of the zone is clear. Where a child starts to make mistakes and difficulties and cannot cope by himself, this is the lower boundary and the beginning of the zone of proximal development. The question is where it ends. Here, the thesis about awareness becomes very important. The second boundary of the zone of proximal development is where the child ceases to understand the adult and loses the ability to interact with him or her consciously. From the thesis that cooperation is conscious interaction, an important thesis follows that, in the process of working with learning difficulties and providing assistance, it is necessary to carry out the reflection of joint activity, otherwise it is not certain that the interaction will be conscious: the child may agree with you, do as you say, but whether he or she does it consciously or just copies your actions, or tries to guess what you want is unknown. By asking reflective questions about how the child understands you, how he or she sees difficulty, how he or she sees the way to overcome it, whether he or she understands how you helped him or her, what exactly he or she could not do on his or her own and what he or she needs to learn to overcome this difficulty, we can assess from the child's answers how consciously he or she interacts with you, what exactly he or she does not understand, what kind of help he or she needs.

How is the process of development itself conceived? We know Vygotsky's basic law: what was shared in action becomes personal; interiorization is the process by which development takes place. But things are not so simple here. When we talk about learning, everything is clear: the child could not count in tens by himself, together with an adult he learnt to do it, and then he learnt to do it himself. He has taken a step in learning. It is still unclear where the development is here, but we will show it a little later.

First, let's discuss what thesis follows from the idea of the boundaries of the ZPD, which is directly related to the problem of help. If a child does not act in the zone of proximal development, but does what he or she is able to do, i.e. in the zone of actual development, he or she does not develop. This was pointed out by L.S. Vygotsky. This is directly related to those children who are successful in school, for them tasks do not cause difficulties and problems. He/she does, solves, but being successful in learning, he/she does not develop. But there is also a zone of actual inaccessibility - where the child is not able to understand the task and act consciously even together with the teacher, with an adult. If a child has to stay in the zone of actual inaccessibility for a long time, we consider it as a risk of psychological trauma. There was one remarkable study by Valeria Yuryevna Andreyuk from Nizhny Novgorod, who showed that truants who do not go to school are not at all mentally unhealthy people, and in some sense, they are even psychologically better off than children who go to school [9]. We explained this fact by obtaining data from the school situation questionnaire [29]. All truants wrote that they have difficulties in this or that subject, which they themselves are unable to overcome - one hundred per cent answered "yes" to this question, and all one hundred per cent answered "no" to the question: "Do you receive help in overcoming your difficulties?". If a person comes to school and cannot cope with a task, cannot even understand it and does not get help, he has nothing to do there, there is no reason to study in such a school. And, unfortunately, this situation often occurs in middle school, because in primary school children are still somehow led by a teacher, but in middle school the teacher deals more with the subject than with the teenage child, and he discovers gaps in knowledge. But in order for the teacher to eliminate them, you have to go back to primary school, and the teacher has to move through the program. The burden on parents increases, but parents usually can't do anything to help.

Now, for example, one of the pupils I work with is in the seventh grade, but he has errors for the first and second grade, and he has such massive gaps, which are very difficult to compensate, he is in a very difficult situation psychologically. Thanks to a teacher who understands this and does not lose faith in him - the pupil is gradually catching up. But once again, psychologically it is a very difficult situation and a serious risk of psychological trauma and personality deformation.

We will transform the concept of ZPD into a multi-vector model, which I will show a little later. And this thesis of L.S. Vygotsky: "One step in learning can give a hundred steps in development", we interpreted as that in the very dynamics of development there is a certain problem epicenter, which has a "magic" property to reveal the blocked vectors of development and immediately open the possibility of movement along several vectors [26]. Christel Manske, a follower of L.S. Vygotsky from Hamburg, has just come to Russia with a lecture; she is very fond of talking about the child's internal intents and that the task of an adult who helps a child is to remove "blockages from the child's internal intents" [39]. We can imagine that a problem epicenter is such a blockage of many vectors at once, and if we manage to help him/her in this problem epicenter, then breaking through it gives the effect of "explosive dynamics" [27].

Finally, looking ahead, I would like to say that in the study of the seven types of assistance that we first identified with Alla Borisovna Kholmogorova and Elizaveta Nikolayevna Klimenkova [58], and then with Antonina Aleksandrovna Ageeva, we identified them in the study of parental assistance, only two of them can be considered as promoting development according to our criteria [28]. The effectiveness of the remaining types of assistance is highly problematic: some of them cause direct harm to the child, and others have risks of negative developmental consequences.

Thus, the problem of aid becomes particularly important in terms of the fact that it is not so obvious. From the point of view of what we have just looked at, an adult can help, in the sense of facilitating development, or not help, or even harm. Let us look at the mechanisms that can be described on the basis of a multi-vector model of the zone of proximal development, which integrates all these provisions that were mentioned above.

The mechanism of effective assistance is thought of in this way. It turns out to be in the plane of learning activity, and here a step in learning is taken. And all the changes in a person, which accompany this step, occur along other vectors of cognitive, reflective abilities and personal qualities. And development can be likened to an opening flower. By the way, we have started to call the scheme of the multi-vector model "flower". And the main changes, when working with a child as a subject of his/her own development and overcoming his/her own difficulties, occur first of all in the vector of development of the subject position in relation to learning activity, the vector of reflection and the vector of self-efficacy. This is a personal psychological basis of learning. It is clear that when a child is influenced, pressured, humiliated, demanded to do something that is not meaningful, these vectors are blocked, and in this sense, the problem of the functional literacy of the teacher and parent is primarily that, without relying on this resource of the child, without facilitating the movement along these vectors, the teacher or parent unwittingly blocks them and closes the very basic mechanisms that can be included in learning activities, call to life, and first of all - work with learning difficulties, because when faced with a difficulty, the child needs to work with it. If the child does not have a difficulty, he does not need it.

Accordingly, help from the position of the reflective activity-based approach can produce very different effects of developmental assistance and can develop different abilities, different competences.

Now, as for the help itself. Assistance can be seen as helping a child to overcome a specific difficulty, i.e. to cope with a problem situation. And help can be seen as developmental assistance. What types of help were identified in our research [28]? These are seven types, as I have already said. I start with those that were seen as negative and harmful to development. This is anti-help, which exacerbates the child's problematic situations and experiences, and destroys the child-adult relationship. Formal help. It is milder than anti-help, but it too is experienced by the child as ineffective adult involvement and - the same thing - in milder forms, it aggravates the situation and does not contribute to development. Instrumental help. The adult suggests how to overcome a difficulty, does it for the child, gives advice, a leading question, and this help enables the child to cope with a particular situation. But how it works in terms of development is unknown, here, quite ambiguous interpretations are possible. Empathic help. This is a very important component, especially if the child has strong feelings about difficulties. By itself, it provides an opportunity to stabilize the emotional state, but does not help to overcome the difficulty. Finally, instrumental-empathic help, in combination. Yes, it seems to be effective, but, in reality, its effect on development is unclear and far from unambiguous.

The two types of help that we single out as really contributing towards development are reflexive help, which helps to reflect on the shortcomings of one's own way of acting and to consciously restructure and overcome it with the help of an adult, and reflective empathic help. As I have already said, if this difficulty is experienced by the child as some unpleasant, difficult event, then taking this emotional component into account is very important and strengthens the relationship between the child and the adult, the emotional contact, and also contributes to the work of the very mechanisms that then contribute to development.

And here is what was obtained in the study of the parents in the work of Antonina Aleksandrovna Ageeva [28]. Reflective and reflective empathic help accounted for 5.5%, and 94.5% were ineffective types of help. At the same time, formal help and anti-help account for 25% of types of help, i.e. in a quarter, in 25% of cases, parents are highly likely to harm their child when trying to help him/her in his/her studies. And instrumental help - 54% - as we said, it is ambiguous in terms of its impact on development and very problematic. We have not conducted such a study on teachers, but it was done by Elizaveta Nikolaevna Klimenkova on the students of pedagogical universities, colleges and the psychologists of our university [35]. Very interesting data. In college students, formal and anti-help dominated, in students of pedagogical universities instrumental help dominated, and only in students of psychological universities reflective and reflective empathic help was found in rather weighty indicators. What was pleasant is that those students who took a course on the reflective empathic approach to helping showed better results in this sense in terms of helping than students of pedagogical universities and other psychology students.

There is a big problem, a huge field of work to somehow help parents to change their ways of helping, to improve their psychological, human literacy, to learn how to provide developmental help, and the same goes for teachers. So, in this sense, if the cause of a child's learning difficulties is an imperfection in the learner's ways of doing things, then the developmental problems that a child has are largely due to an imperfection in the ways in which they receive help from adults. Why and on what grounds do we consider reflective and reflective empathic help to be effective? Because it contributes to supporting the child's subjective position, triggering the mechanism of self-development, movement in reflection and the development of the ability to reflect and restructure ways, and thus the difficulty faced by the child becomes a resource for development.

Development of Meta-Subject Competencies by Means of Theatrical Activity as a Condition for the Formation of Psychological Literacy of Adolescents in Secondary School[4]

In recent years, psychological literacy is in the focus of psychological and pedagogical research. In Russia, psychological literacy is understood as the acquisition of "psychological knowledge and the tools that allow a person to consciously and reasonably treat himself and others, to know, consider and understand their individual capabilities and characteristics" [42]. This kind of knowledge is acquired in the process of socialization (the assimilation of social norms, cultural appropriation), in the formation of one's own identity and worldview, including the development of communication skills, reflection, critical thinking, etc. [3; 42] (fig. 1).

Figure 1. Development of psychological literacy through the achievement of personal and meta-subject results in the framework of the implementation of theatrical activities in secondary school

A.V. Milekhin, among others, developed the issues of the relevance of the development of psychological literacy in schoolchildren. Thus, in 2012, the researcher proposed to introduce the "Psychology" academic subject for study in high school, which would contribute to the development of social and psychological competencies in adolescents, stimulate positive changes in self-concept, the motivational, value and meaning spheres as a result of the meaningful inclusion of psychological knowledge in everyday life and the correction of their own behavior [42]. In addition, the components of psychological literacy are, in many respects, related to and/or are the results of the development of meta-subject competences, the achievement of personal educational results. For example, the awareness of one's mental capabilities directly affects the mastery of cognitive UEAs, the mastery of self-regulation and self-organization processes. In turn, the development of communicative UEAs is impossible without acquiring knowledge about oneself and others as the subjects and objects of interaction, respectively (Fig. 1).

In foreign literature, psychological literacy appears as the competencies and knowledge possessed by graduates of psychological faculties of universities [64]. Including one of the tools of teaching psychology and a condition for mastering psychological literacy is theater pedagogy [63]. It is worth noting that the use of theatrical activities for learning, developmental, and educational purposes, including the development of metacognitive competencies and, consequently, psychological literacy, is confirmed by a number of studies [46].

One large-scale project in Russia that confirms the effectiveness of theatrical methods in education, is "Multimedia Theater" [49; 50]. This project, among other things, is designed to meet the modern school's demand for the creation of a pedagogical technology capable of solving a number of tasks:

• to ensure interdisciplinarity, to help students establish links between knowledge from separate academic disciplines;
• to ensure the mastery of the UEAs;
• to socialize and integrate different categories of students, including students with disabilities, into the school community;
• to improve discipline and foster responsibility;
• to develop pupils' creative abilities and critical thinking;
• to contribute to the cohesion of school teams.

"Multimedia Theater" is a special communicative and activity environment that allows teenagers to safely and consciously make a "trial" of any action, experiment with roles and positions, relationships. The emphasis is not on the production as such, but on the process of its preparation - on the distribution of the functions and personal responsibility of the participants, on working out a work plan, searching for and selecting material, on writing a script, creating scenery, living through the emotional states of the characters, as well as on discussions both during the work on the performance and after the show.

Thus, "Multimedia Theater" is:

• a complex of different activities related to the preparation and realization of a theatrical performance;
• experimentation with social roles;
• an opportunity to build different variants of child-adult communities;
• work with digital technologies.

To date, the project has been running for more than 4 years and has been tested at five schools (Moscow, Stary Gorodok, Stupino and Kashira, Moscow Region). The work within the Multimedia Theatre Project involves not so much the production of a performance as the variety of the preparation: acting tasks, verbal and non-verbal interaction training, discussions, information gathering and searching activities, the creation of creative products, including writing a script, preparing costumes and scenery, and so on. In many ways, the developmental effect is achieved through children's and children-adult communities, teamwork, the development of not only horizontal ties in the team, but also vertical ones.

Figure 2. Stages of work within the framework of the Multimedia Theater project

The activities of the "Multimedia Theater" project include three stages:

- preparatory;

- creative;

- final.

During the preparatory stage, teenagers develop an understanding of the structure of theatrical activity, the interrelation of its components and the importance of teamwork for a successful production. Teenagers perform their first acting tests, learn stage movement and improvisation. Also, if possible, they study literary material for the future production, collect and search for historical, cultural and biographical information to better understand and present the era in the context of which the production will be staged. It is possible to watch and analyze existing screen adaptations of literary material with further discussions, study the correspondence of the author/authors of literary works, reviews and feedback from contemporaries. During theatre classes, much attention is given to the semantic reading, analysis and correlation of different types of text, and the analysis of screen adaptations. Immersion in various cultural and historical materials is achieved through excursions, trips to libraries to collect, among other things, documentary material on the topic under development. The aim of the search and semantic reading tasks is to arouse interest in the project, to teach teenagers how to work with information, and to develop skills in presenting the results of analyses, for example, in tabular form or in the form of an essay or review. Such activities not only develop meta-subject competencies, but teenagers also get to know better about themselves, their own capabilities, the world around them and their place in it.

Often teenagers are so immersed in theater training that they start rehearsing on their own, practicing acting and articulation exercises during breaks. Of special interest to teenagers at the preparatory stage are exercises for developing the imagination, composing stories, improvisation. Making up stories can also fulfil educational goals. For example, in the exercise of making up a story in a circle, adding a new sentence to the statement of the previous participant, the teenagers tried to reveal the meaning of such a phenomenon as friendship. Having invented the beginning: "one day I woke up in the morning and discovered that I had forgotten what friendship is", they tried not only to define and realize the phenomenon itself, but also the ways how it can be renewed, what actions to take in order to feel it again, to restore some friendship ties and to feel a friendly shoulder.

The second stage of the project is a creative stage, in which teachers try to consolidate the newly acquired knowledge of the participants, including through the detailed analysis of the characters, the creation of cartoons in the cutout technique. Teenagers begin to "try on" roles, "go through" sketches by the etude method, form the cast for the future performance, organize "workshops" for the production of costumes, scenery, products accompanying the performance - wall newspapers, programs, posters. The most difficult and labor-intensive at this stage is writing the script. It should be noted that the goal of the final production is not to reproduce A.P. Chekhov or N.V. Gogol verbatim according to a textbook or a collection of essays, but the goal is to solve some of the pupils' own problems or conflicts, to reveal a question of interest to them by means of theatre, on the basis of literary materials. Thus, for example, as part of the preparation of the play "Who are you, Mr. Chekhov?", the idea of which arose among pupils of the Public Secondary School No. 4 in Kashira after visiting the Melikhovo estate, the 7th grade pupils tried to realize the legacy of the great writer. While working on the theatre project, they reflected on Chekhov as a writer, a doctor who stopped a pandemic, a philanthropist and a landowner. At the end of the project, the teenagers concluded that Chekhov was, above all, a patriot and a great citizen of Russia. Often within the multimedia part of theater projects, teenagers like the activity of creating animations to support ideas; such cartoons help to interpret the statements of the characters, help to convey the intent of the works. For example, in the last project, interesting work was organized around the creation of cartoons illustrating Chekhov's great quotes, including "While you are young, do good" or "Indifference is the paralysis of the soul". Based on these quotes, the teenagers created short stories and then put them into animation. The creative stage of the theater project preparation is completed by discussions, an analysis of the created products, searching for directorial solutions in accordance with the draft script, reworking the texts of the stories into dialogues and shorthand that reveal their content.

The final stage is the most responsible with regards to the quality of the produced performance, its final "assembly". At this stage, video and photo footage shot earlier is edited and integrated into the general framework of the upcoming performance. There is also the selection of soundtracks, the honing of acting, simplification, reduction or, on the contrary, the complication and detailing of the script.

During the 4 years of the Multimedia Theatre project, 5 performances were prepared. Depending on the school's request, they were staged to prevent bullying; to analyze adolescent experiences related to the COVID-19 pandemic; to try new creative genres (writing epigrams and stand-ups based on Nikolai Gogol's "The Government Inspector", writing a fable based on A.P. Chekhov's story "Enemies"); to establish communication between classmates; to teach teamwork skills, etc. In turn, empirical research has been conducted. In turn, empirical research within the framework of the Multimedia Theatre project demonstrated that adolescents improve their skills of self-organization and the organization of activities in a team, reflection skills and interpersonal communication with peers and adults [49; 50]. The level of learning motivation also increases, conflict situations are resolved, and difficult adolescents are more willing to make contact with psychologists and teachers. Theatre projects at school also contribute to the involvement and adaptation of students with disabilities, children from disadvantaged families or those who are on the internal register at school.

Observing the activities and progress of adolescents, teachers also often not only provide support, but independently continue to introduce theatre activities into the educational process. For example, an open lesson-investigation with theatrical elements dedicated to Sherlock Holmes was held at Kashira Public Secondary School No. 4.

Work with adolescents is often reduced not only to educational and developmental tasks, but also to diagnostic and therapeutic ones. The main difficulties identified during the implementation of the Multimedia Theater project are:

- Superficial reading - failure to understand the meaning of what is read, difficulties in interpreting both prose and poetic text, finding the author's point of view in the text, argumentation.

- Weak digital competences, including the inability to use online resources and search engines to gather information when writing a script. Many adolescents do not have computers at home or access to them, hence difficulties with editing and typing, many do not know how to use a printer and scanner; adolescents' work is centered on smartphones and their apps, which severely limits their ability to work with documents.

- Lack of planning and prognosis skills - the inability to plan activities step-by-step, the inability to calculate the steps to achieve goals and foresee the consequences of their own actions, a lack of vision for the integrity of activities. They are also characterized by the inability to concentrate, to bring a task to completion, to achieve a final result; any project activity leads to misunderstanding and confusion.

- Lack of independence in actions and initiative - learned helplessness, an unwillingness to act without adult guidance.

According to the report of the Minister of Education of the Russian Federation S.S. Kravtsov, the application of theatre activities in the educational process and the revival of school theatres is the most important direction in the development of modern schools. Today, there are already 24000 school theatres, and by 2024 it is planned to open a theatre in every school. The relevance of the topic and the growing scientific interest in the theatrical activity of children and teenagers were also noted at the All-Russian conference on the 29th March 2023 "Education - Theater: the personal development of students in a polyartistic space". To date, the Multimedia Theatre project has the task of covering more and more regions of Russia to spread theatre practices in schools, to study the specifics of theatre activities in schools depending on the age, cultural and social affiliation of the students.

Functional Literacy of Parents as a Factor of the Harmonization of a Family Upbringing[5]

I would like to note that the term "functional literacy of parents" is a debatable concept. When analyzing literature in preparation for the seminar, I more often met such concepts as "parental competence", "psychological literacy of parents", "psychological culture of parents", which are more traditional and popular. There is not enough information in scientific literature directly about the functional literacy of parents. Nevertheless, I believe that it is extremely important to consider this concept within the framework of developmental psychology and family psychology.

The problem of relationships between parents and children will never lose its relevance, and, in my opinion, this problem is of a particular interest not only for psychologists and teachers, but also for the parents themselves, who are now extremely active, included in the process of education, studying a lot of various literature in order to harmonize child-parent relationships.

Of course, there is no doubt that the family plays an essential role in the development of the child, mediates interaction with the environment and fulfils several important functions. These include meeting the need for emotional support, acceptance, respect, protection, and so on (E.G. Eidemiller, J. Bowlby, L.I. Bozhovich, M.I. Lisina, etc.) [2; 38].

And it should be said that upbringing is a rather complex and multifaceted process, which depends on many factors. Here, it is not only about the knowledge of parents, but also about the specificity of the emotional sphere of the parent themself, their knowledge, individual characteristics, their own experience of upbringing in the parental family.

If we look at parenthood as an integral concept, I would single out several planes that are worth paying attention to in this respect. This is the plane of individual and personal characteristics of a man and a woman, who make up a family union, because this also has a special influence on the relationship with the child, the relationship in the family, the relationship between the couple, a man and woman, husband and wife have their influence on the child as well. A plane that covers both spouses in unity as their value orientations, parental positions, feelings, and a plane that captures the interconnection of generations in their own parental family, and, accordingly, a plane that reveals parenthood in the system of social relations.

According to R.V. Ovcharova, the future of society is the current state of parenthood [44]. So, it is very important to increase the functional literacy of parents, parental competence, the knowledge about approaches in upbringing. To date, the actual problem becomes the "functional literacy of parents" in child upbringing and the definition of this concept. Moreover, the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation has developed a project: "Monitoring the formation of functional literacy", which once again emphasizes the relevance of the discussion of the stated topic [17].

Functional literacy is understood as the formation of the ability to use all the knowledge, skills and abilities constantly acquired during life to solve the widest possible range of life tasks in various spheres of human activity.

Accordingly, if we transfer this definition to parenting and child-parent relations, we can reflect on what the "functional literacy of parents" is.

B.S. Gershunsky emphasizes the personal orientation of the "functional literacy" category, showing its place in the process of personality formation. Functional literacy includes components: computer literacy, information literacy, environmental literacy, psychological and pedagogical literacy, medical and hygienic literacy, artistic and aesthetic literacy, etc. Functional literacy has an integrative character, which is manifested in the fact that mastering the content of the mentioned phenomenon as a whole means mastering all its components, this is also worth paying attention to [22].

In pedagogical research the concept of "functional literacy" is considered in the problem field of the competency-based approach [57]. O.E. Lebedev considers functional literacy as one of the indicators of the level of education within the competency-based approach. Actually, as stated earlier, it is the ability to solve various functional problems that a person meets, and if we talk about a parent, then, accordingly, with those tasks that they meet in the field of child-parent relations, as the realization of his parental position. Functional literacy is not just the knowledge, skills and abilities that will be applied by parents during upbringing, but also their conscious and arbitrary application in solving life tasks. The question arises about the need to develop the functional literacy of parents, which contributes to the preparation of children for successful interaction in changing life situations [33].

A competent parent understands that, in order to ensure the comprehensive development of the child, it is necessary to develop oneself, to try, to search, to learn. Thus, there is a complex and debatable question of how to develop the functional literacy of parents. One of such ways can be the psychological education of parents, but it is important to remember that this is not the only solution to the task at hand.

Parental competency acts as a formative personal education, manifested in the form of the preparedness of the personality for the constructive implementation of the parental role [11]. Thus, functional literacy is one of the manifestations of dynamic personal properties that characterize the interests, value system, needs and motives of human behavior. Continuing this idea, it is worth noting that it is impossible to form functional literacy without knowledge and skills in a certain area, moreover – without the independent creative use of this knowledge and skills that form on the basis of existing experience, and an emotional attitude towards this knowledge, towards oneself, hence the degree of literacy (morality) of parental behavior.

We can conditionally consider functional literacy in the narrow sense of the word - it is knowledge about the styles and types of child-parent relations, the ability to apply basic educational approaches in order to harmonize relationships, knowledge about styles of relationships of the spouses themselves, because it is the style of relationships in the family that directly affects the well-being of the child; the creation of a positive emotional environment for the purpose of the all-round mental development of the child; knowledge about factors of educational influence, knowledge about educational positions.

Functional literacy of parents in the broad sense of the word is a synthesis of knowledge, the abilities and skills that constitute the content of functional literacy of a parent and that call for ensuring the effective functioning of the individual, i.e. the child, in the system of child-parent relations. The following components in this respect are proposed, which are highlighted by A.B. Belinskaya [11]:

1. Psycho-pedagogical functional literacy as mastering and using in practice the concepts of normative personality types, age-related psychological characteristics of the child, as the ability to organize effective interpersonal interaction in the process of family upbringing, as well as mastering and using in practice the concepts of ways to solve the problems of family upbringing;
2. Medical and hygienic functional literacy (the ability to identify a child's psychosomatic condition that requires immediate medical attention; skills in caring for a sick child, providing conditions for the development of a child's health culture and introducing him or her to a healthy lifestyle);
3. Ethnic and intercultural functional literacy, which manifests itself in the formation of children's appreciation of national culture, the nurturing of the national spirit in a multi-ethnic environment, the interiorization of the elements of intercultural communication, the mastery of foreign languages, the assimilation and transmission of the knowledge of the traditions, history, customs, lifestyle of other peoples, their beliefs, etc.;
4. Legal functional literacy (familiarity with the norms of family law implementation, participation in legal education of children);
5. Functional literacy in the spiritual and moral sphere (perception as a value of norms and meanings that are significant for the given community, maintenance of national traditions, striving to bring up such a worldview in one's children);
6. Activity-based functional literacy (parents' ability to set and change the goals and objectives of educational activity; to organize family socio-pedagogical activity to form social skills, social skills and social intelligence in the child; to improve communicative processes in the course of pedagogical influence on the child).

These are the main components included in the concept of functional literacy of parents.

One of the ways to develop the functional literacy of parents can be qualitatively organized psychological education. The creation of a system of the psychological and pedagogical support of the family and the improvement of parents' pedagogical competency, psychological support of child development in the conditions of the family and educational institution, becomes the most important task of modern society [1].

But, of course, it is important that education is not limited exclusively to knowledge, it is necessary to form in parents the ability to apply it consciously and arbitrarily. It is necessary to form the need for psychological knowledge and its use in the upbringing of a child or in the interests of the development of one's own personality.

One of the main meanings of psychological education can be acquaintance of parents with the basic laws and conditions of the favorable development of the child, and also the popularization of scientifically grounded knowledge, as nowadays there is a big layer of various information on the internet, in social networks, which contains recommendations which do not correspond to scientific data. Many parents are absolutely sure to follow such "recommendations", which often, unfortunately, do not meet the criteria of scientificity. Therefore, it is important that the information for parents is, on one hand, presented in an accessible and understandable language, and on the other hand, represents scientifically based data that will comply with the ethical principle of "do no harm".

Work with the emotional burnout of parents is also important. Nowadays it has become a popular topic that deals with emotional burnout not only in the professional field, but also in the field of child rearing. Such a term as the "emotional burnout of parents" has appeared. Especially it concerns mothers who are on maternity leave for a long time.

The main point of psychological education:

- to acquaint parents with the basic laws and conditions of the favorable mental development of the child;

- to popularize and explain the results of the latest psychological research;

- to form the need for psychological knowledge, the desire to use it in the upbringing of a child or in the interests of the development of one's own personality;

- to achieve an understanding of the need for practical psychology and the work of a psychologist in a children's institution, and to rely on the recommendations of a psychologist.

Examples of topics for an educational seminar for parents:

- Regularities of development in different age periods.

- Crises in the child's mental development.

- Child-parent relations and their peculiarities at different stages of ontogenesis, new models of child-parent relations.

- Child development, developmental techniques characteristic of each age period.

- Motivation for learning.

- Difficulties of school learning.

- Anxiety, children's fears, insecurity, aggressiveness, hyperactivity, shyness and so on.

- Problems of the adolescent period.

- Adaptation to school.

- Age features of a junior schoolboy.

- Readiness for school.

- Unfavorable variants of development in the younger school age.

- Safe use of the internet

These can be quite different topics – the regularities of child development at different ages, sensitive periods for the development of certain psychological processes, functions, etc.

One of the forms of the psychological education of parents can be the development of an "Developmental Psychology for Parents" course. The aim of the course is to educate modern parents in order to reduce the risks of difficulties in child-parent relations, to form a stable need to use psychological knowledge with the help of psychologists.

The educational project reveals the characteristics of the age periodization of child development, includes concentration on the theoretical and practical bases of the long-term research of scientists in coordination with modern research - "portrait of a modern child". The project will help parents to understand the characteristics of the stages of mental formation and development of children, to overcome difficulties in child-parent relations. The material can be presented in the form of a course for parents, including lecture material, case studies, training methods and educational brochures with a convenient systematized presentation of information. Mastering the course will lead to increased awareness, the activation of reflection, both personal and social, and the formation of psychologically healthy attitudes. For society as a whole, of course, this is also an important task, as it increases the social significance of psychological knowledge and can make up for the lack of representation of scientific, reliable, psychological knowledge.

In conclusion, I would like to emphasize once again that one of the most modern and convenient forms of building a dialogue between a psychologist and parents are webinars [1]. An example of such activity, which has shown high efficiency, the interest of parents, is the project on rendering services of psychological, pedagogical, methodological and consulting assistance to parents (legal representatives) of children, as well as citizens who want to adopt children without parental care into their families, of the federal "Modern School" project of the "Education" national project, which on the order of the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation, is being implemented in all regions of Russia, including a number of pedagogical and educational institutions. As part of this project, a nationwide parents' competence week was organized, an educational platform for parents featuring leading experts in the development and upbringing of children and adolescents. Psychologists, pedagogues, specialists in the development of children with special needs conducted webinars, masterclasses and round tables on the most urgent requests of parents [1].

Features of the Interaction Between Teachers and Parents with Preschoolers[6]

Professional activity puts many in education before the need to at least approach the understanding of relatively new terms. The concepts of "functional literacy", "functional psychological literacy" have quite often become central in the works of colleagues. And although these terms are not new in world science, in order for them to "take root" it is necessary to understand the very essence of these phenomena. It seems that functional psychological literacy is a literacy for life, which helps a person to interact with others. This quality, which is included in human culture, is an element of psychological culture, as N.N. Avdeeva noted.

The essence of this concept can become clearer if we turn to the preschool age. Due to the specifics of children's development at this age, some causes of difficulties and problems are more clearly presented and are even on the surface. And in order for, in the future, in older ages, fewer tasks to overcome difficulties to arise, it is worth taking a step back. Any interaction of an adult with a child of an early age or a preschooler educates him: teaches, educates, forms his childhood experience. Getting into any situation, first of all the child tries to understand it, to make sense of it. At the same time, a teacher or a parent tries to mediate, to help him or her - he or she tries to comment on the situation or task, to explain it or clarify it, to focus attention on the important points. It is at the first stage of a child's orientation in a situation or task that problems may already arise, which, if not resolved, will not lead to cooperation, interaction, to some solution of the situation by the child, but will lead to some negative consequences, conflict situations, negative experiences. Such situations are a vivid illustration of the functional psychological illiteracy of an adult.

To confirm this, it is enough to recall various examples, which we happened to observe in educational practice and in the interaction between an adult and a child. For example, at a lesson at the beginning of the second youngest group (fourth year of life) the teacher offered the children the game "Hide the mouse". This didactic game is widely known in preschool education. Each child has to "hide" a mouse from the cat by closing the doors of the houses, i.e. to match the color of the circles (doors) to the houses and "close" the doors of the houses (put the circle in the slot on the rectangle of the corresponding color). This is a task for the development of perception, for mastering the action of identification. The teacher, working with the children, gives the following instruction: "Look, children, there are mice in the houses, they need to hide from the kitty. Please close the red house with the red door, the blue house with the blue door and so on". And, accordingly, not all children fulfilled the task. There were those in the group who have this action at the stage of forming, and do not yet know what color is called orange and purple. Two children in the group could not "hide" two mice from the orange and purple houses. The teacher started trying to help them: first she repeated her task, then she accentuated - the orange door should be put on the orange house. And only after several variants of the used help did the teacher find a verbal instruction that was understandable to these children - find a door of the same color as the house. After that, as it is clear, the children solved the problem. It is obvious that the children's difficulties were caused only by the fact that the educator did not take into account the features of the development of the child's cognitive sphere, the ability to understand the adult's words.

The absence of functional psychological literacy is also illustrated by the story about cold milk. A two-and-a-half-year-old child asked his grandmother for cold milk. He was poured it from a bag that had been taken out of the fridge. But he was not allowed to drink it immediately, he was told that it should warm up a little. This situation caused crying and the justified indignation of the child: in his understanding, the adult offered the impossible, and in the end gave the child warm milk.

There are many examples that illustrate that many problems and negative experiences of young children are caused by the fact that adults do not take into account the obvious age-related, underlying characteristics of children. They do not know, or ignore, the specificity and accuracy of the child's perception of the adult's words.

One educator and artist recommended that teachers should not be afraid to tell children precisely and in detail, specifically what they want to see the child draw, i.e. to formulate the task as clearly as possible. Even if you do preliminary work with the children and consider the patterns that are obtained from the intertwining of branches, and then ask them to draw a tree, the result will be a carrot with sticks. Because they looked at a pattern, but they were asked to draw a tree, and at this age  a tree is mostly drawn  in this way.

It is extremely important that the adult, when addressing the child, takes into account his age features, in particular, the possibilities of cognitive sphere, the possibilities of thinking, the possibilities of understanding, the possibilities of the perception of speech addressed to him. It seems that functional literacy as literacy for life is a generalized notion, understanding, say, as a minimum, that children have their own peculiarities, different from adults. This is something that is often repeated to students: that a young child is not a miniature adult, it has its own specific characteristics.

The task of the formation and development of functional psychological literacy seems to be extremely important for both parents and teachers.

And the ways for formation are different. Future teachers master, in the process of training, the necessary knowledge and skills, master initial pedagogical experience to use them in various typical educational situations. However, for an effective interaction with children, it is necessary to have a generalized understanding that a child has certain features and the ability to use this understanding in real interaction with a child, i.e. functional psychological literacy.

If, figuratively, it is possible to present the path of teachers towards functional psychological literacy as an ascent from particular to general, parents move on the same road, but in the opposite direction. They should not possess all the knowledge, skills and abilities that a teacher possesses. And the parent should move from understanding that the baby, who appeared in the family, is not like them, it´s not an adult, he grows and learns, and he must understand the adult towards specific knowledge and skills that he can use to solve the problems of education, upbringing and development of his child.

And, if the formation or improvement of the functional psychological literacy of teachers is possible in the process of professional training, then for parents there is the main path - education (in the broad sense of the word). It is carried out through various forms of interaction with the family of preschoolers and young children: family clubs, family projects, master classes, lectures, consultations, etc. Educational activities are now one of the trends in Russian education.

But there are unresolved problems on this path.

Firstly, the themes of educational activities. For example, it is known that interested adults, those who have had or are having some difficulties or problems in interacting with children, their education and upbringing, those who recognize these difficulties and are looking for ways to overcome them, become involved in various forms of education. They become "forcefully literate" (the term proposed by I.V. Abankina"forced literacy"). It is these problems that determine the themes of educational activities. In addition, the choice of the content of educational activities is dictated by the ideas of teachers and psychologists about what is important for children's development and what is important for parents to know about the child. That is, professionals believe that it is important to tell parents in order for the children to develop more safely and harmoniously.

Secondly, no one has yet determined the effectiveness of educational activities, the criteria and indicators of formed functional psychological literacy. There is a need to develop a tool that will allow us to understand the effectiveness of the educational efforts of professionals. How can the functional literacy of an adult be assessed? What is necessary to look at - that the number of problems in children related to child-parent relations disappears?

Thirdly, a large part of parents who do not realize the difficulties and try to solve educational tasks based on their own pedagogical ideas remains out of the field of educational activities. In this connection, it is interesting to consider the proposal of pedagogue T.V. Krivtsova that it is necessary to form the demand of a large number of parents for certain topics. How are such requests formed? Maybe, existing experience can be used to help? Maybe the technique used in the wonderful long-standing "The Mouth of a Baby" program will be effective? To draw parents' attention to their child, to the features of his/her perception of the world: the adult world, the world of nature, the world of peers, his/her own self. To form a request to understand their own children, even if these children do not cause problems for parents. Introduce them to psychological culture through the formation and improvement of functional psychological literacy as a basis.

Functional Psychological Literacy of Parents and Teachers in the Context of Social Interaction and Bullying Prevention[7]

My professional interests are only partially related to the topic under discussion. The first is the problem of the family. In Moscow, for example, there are only 40% of traditional families. And this process tends to reduce the number of whole families. This was not taken into account in today's discussion – the entire time they were talking about some two-parent families, while a huge number of parents are, generally speaking, single parents. Some of them are starting a family for the second or third time. We do not really know the average duration of marriage, how many changing parents a child has, who is actually ready to perceive psychological literacy through clubs, through some other forms of work.

Related to this is the fact that we need to take into account that there is such a phenomenon as family violence, and in our country, according to outdated data, there are 50% of official and unofficial families in which parents either regularly or occasionally beat each other. How many of them hit their children remains unknown. Some of them firmly believe that this too is helping the child's functional literacy. Those examples that V.K. Zaretskii gave, they are just for a good part of parents who somehow participate and respond to the child's requests. And some respond to the child's request simply with violence.

But the more serious problem is of two kinds. One is bullying in school. If you consider that, according to Russian data, the prevalence of bullying in school is 37%, it is a very serious problem. At the same time, the interests of those who research bullying are, of course, primarily related to bullies or bullying victims, and much less attention is paid to observers. Whereas observers fall apart into groups. One part of the observers begins to sympathize with the bully and another part sympathizes with the victim. But the observers have some training going on for them, the child himself may not be involved in all this, but knows very well that violence helps in achieving some goals. But the most interesting thing here is that children note that they have this phenomenon in their class, that there is bullying, they observed it, while a large number of teachers do not see it, they note that it does not exist. It is clear, the simplest explanation is that they just don't want to make a mess out of it, but in reality, many of them are actually (and research shows this) the initiators, they manage the collective with its help. And naturally, they are not anti-bullying. And the saddest thing about all this is that teachers in schools – from what we have researched - are very authoritarian people. Our study of pedagogical university students showed that if you compare what happens to authoritarianism in the first year and in the fifth year, there is much more authoritarianism in the fifth year than in the first year. That is, the teacher training college itself creates such conditions that future teachers become more authoritarian on the way out. Unfortunately, the desire of many teachers to have everyone march in formation is found in quite a large number of studies. We obtained this data in a study of almost all the schools in Sverdlovsk Oblast. That is, this is a very serious problem indeed.

Related to this is something we have been dealing with for quite a long time: gelatophobia - the fear of being ridiculed. A large number of children are afraid of public speaking, expressing their opinions, participating in active school life, because they are afraid of being ridiculed by their own fellow pupils and teachers. It remained outside of our research, although it is actually very interesting, and how teachers, pedagogues use jokes in a negative, in this case, perspective to teach and transfer their knowledge, their desire for the student to be better. Studies show that among the adult population in the world, on average, it is from 5 to 15%, in our country about 7% of adults suffer from gelatophobia, but in teenagers it is higher than 7%. According to our research, it turns out to be somewhere around 14% in some regions. So, it's the kids who are not active. How many of them become gelatophobic due to their parents' jokes is still a mystery. But all this greatly affects the effectiveness of their influence on children, and teachers have to somehow be informed about the problem of gelatophobia. They don't always realize that it is very dangerous. This is a very strong and good tool – a teachers' sense of humor. But here is the facet of using this very strong and sharp tool remains behind the scenes. And if we say that something needs to be done, then they need to do something in connection with authoritarianism and gelatophobia in teaching teams. In other words, we need to improve the literacy not only of parents to understand some dark spots and places of application of our psychological power.

Psychological Literacy of Parents - in Search of Sources[8]

The problem of the insufficient psychological literacy of parents was raised several decades ago, but it is still far from being solved. This is due to the fact that, so far, there is no specialized training for such a difficult and responsible parental activity, and modern parents, adults, have to educate themselves.

Traditionally, the source of parental competence was the parental family, where the child gets acquainted with the practice of child-parent relations and family upbringing. The assimilation of family patterns of behavior, the life scenarios of the parental family leads to their transmission, and, often unconsciously and against one's will, reproduction. It is this practice that becomes the basis for the formation of one's own parental position. However, it has to be stated that an adult is often forced to borrow not always the most successful experience, which limits the boundaries of his competence. Incompetence associated with the ignorance of pedagogical methods, the underestimation of family upbringing, the inability to interact with children, the inability to assess the prospects of child development and create favorable conditions for the possibility of their implementation, according to T.V. Kovalenko, causes the failure of the modern family [15; 24; 37].

The Problem of Finding Sources of Information in the Process of Forming a Parental Position

At the same time, we can state the fact that young people have become more responsible for the decision to become parents, strive to prepare for the realization of parental activity. A natural step of such independent preparation is the search for information about child development and upbringing. The modern level of development of psychology allows us to successfully solve the problem of forming a harmonious parental position. Not only in narrowly scientific, but also in practice-oriented literature much attention is paid to the issues of the content and genesis of its formation [16; 31; 32; 54; 59; 62]. The reliance on scientific ideas allows to successfully acquire competency in taking into account the age specificity of the child (familiarity with the peculiarities of age development, which should be taken into account in the process of upbringing), competency in building interaction between the parent and child (acquiring the ability to organize and implement joint activities, a mastery of verbal and non-verbal communication skills, a correct understanding of the child's condition, the ability to create a positive emotional background in the relationship), competency in caring for the child.

At the same time, we can state the fact that the actively implemented digitalization of society has also affected the sphere of family upbringing. In order to achieve parental competence, young people are increasingly using the internet. The new reality of our time has both positive and negative sides [12]. The development of the internet moves traditional means of mass communication into the cyberspace, making available a large amount of information, increasing the timeliness of its arrival. This allows to expand the audience of the media, which is rapidly growing with independent internet media, personal blogs, which makes it easy to create and disseminate information virtually without restrictions [56]. M.A. Karpova notes the significant influence of the media on the formation of the socio-cultural values of the modern man, as well as on his social life [34]. However, the evidence of negative influence deserves attention, one of which is the "patchwork, unstable polyidentity" of content consumers (due to the high speed of the arrival of information, which changes the worldview) [4]. In addition, the issue of the quality of widely available materials is also acute.

Analyzing the Content of the Information Offered on the Internet Regarding the Patterns of Child Development

Our analysis of the content offered to parents revealed a significant number of distorted ideas about child development and upbringing, which poses a serious risk to child well-being. In order to assess the relevance of freely available information and recommendations on child development, we analyzed the content of websites popular among parents. As units of analyzing the information provided, we used such topics of messages as: mechanism of development, specifics of child ontogenesis in comparison with animal cubs, norms of age development, content of parental role, parental attitude, means of upbringing, content of psychological help.

The results of the analysis of the content offered in the internet allowed us to identify the most common variants of the distortions of the information necessary for the implementation of parental activities:

1. A distorted understanding of developmental mechanisms. In the analyzed content, there is often an appeal to some innate program according to which a child should develop. The reader is suggested to "trust nature and the child, to let him/her develop to the maximum, to give a lot of freedom". The justification for this wait-and-see attitude of the adult is the threat of destroying the emotional bond with the child, who, meeting the restrictions and demands of the parent, tends to perceive the child negatively. Readers are urged not to spoil by attempts to develop and educate the child "the pleasure of emotional communication with him/her". In this case, against the background of recognizing the value of a positive emotional communication with the child, the principle of the adult's anticipatory initiative, which sets the zone of the child's proximal development, is ignored. A deprivation situation is created, which closes the perspective of the child's cultural development.
2. Calls for forcing the child's cognitive development, which leads to ignoring the internal logic of the development process and its age specificity. No one is surprised by proposals to attend foreign language courses from the age of 3 months, agitation to immediately start learning the alphabet (from the age of 1) and reading from the age of 3. We have to admit that the desire to force cognitive development resonates with modern parents, who see it as an opportunity to create favorable conditions for the child to live in a competitive environment. The available scientific data testifies to the futility of such a strategy, which, against the background of very doubtful advantages in the child's cognitive development, turns into a violation of his/her psycho-emotional state and attitude towards parents [55].
3. An inadequate understanding of the means of upbringing. Misconceptions about the means of upbringing can be particularly detrimental to a child's development. However, this content is particularly appealing to the reader because there is unity in the pursuit of some of the goals of parenting. For example, most parents aspire for their child to possess a set of personality traits conducive to achieving successful socialization and social acceptance. Most parents would like their child to be initiative, courageous, enduring. We can talk about different strategies for achieving the desired qualities, but urging a child to face the "harsh truth of life" before he or she achieves the necessary prerequisites can have the exact opposite effect. In addition, raising a child requires taking into account the age-related limitations of his or her development. Ignoring a child's age-related capabilities leads to treating his or her behavior as a manifestation of "evil will", which prompts tougher educational influences, including physical ones.
4. The sphere of child-parent relations is also in the focus of attention of bloggers and insufficiently competent practitioners. One can see calls for a critical attitude towards one's feelings towards the child. On the pages of the internet there are warnings about the "excessiveness" of parental love, that a child can be "raped by parental love", that love for a child is secondary to marital love and should not compete with it.

Thus, we can conclude that in the internet the reader may encounter information that distorts the regularities and general logic of child development, which will only complicate the process of forming a parental competence.

This situation leads us to the problem of how the content of the parental competency of today's young generation can be harmonized with the competency of previous generations that did not have the opportunity to use the digital space. The uniqueness of the current situation is that both the representatives of the generation whose competency was formed under the influence of the parental family and a small amount of scientific literature and the generation whose information sources of competence are exclusively in the digital environment are engaged in child upbringing. Researchers note that one of the factors of difference in the level of parental competency among people of different generations is the so-called "digital divide" [41; 52]. In the study by E.A. Sorokoumova, E.B. Mamonov, O.V. Suvorova, and S.N. Sorokoumov, significant differences in the parental attitudes of mothers of different ages were recorded. When studying attitudes towards family roles, more mature parents showed higher values of "parental superauthority" compared to younger parents. And the mothers of the younger generation have significantly higher values of "dissatisfaction with the role of a housewife" and "dependence and non-self-sufficiency of the mother". This study allows us to see some trends in the transformation of parental attitudes, reflecting the different socio-cultural conditions of mothers' maturation [53]. Taking into account the data obtained at the first stage of the study from the analysis of the content on the basis of which the competency of mothers of different generations was formed, we were also interested in what changes in educational content bring to parental attitudes.

An Empirical Study of the Parental Attitudes of Mothers Whose Competency was Formed in Different Periods of Time

The aim of the study was to establish the specificity of parental attitudes taking into account the fact that the internet is becoming a priority source of the young generation.

The study sample consisted of 103 people aged from 21 to 63 years old. Such a wide age range met the objectives of our study and allowed us to divide the sample into groups corresponding to the age cohorts, born in 1990-80-70s of the XX century. The respondents' maturation and acquisition of competency took place in a different information space. We considered this division possible, focusing on the position of the sociocultural approach, in the framework of which a generation is defined as a set of people, limited by age, living in a certain historical period, in a certain sociocultural environment and united by similar values [51]. A.I. Afanasyeva defines a generation as "an objectively forming specifically historical set of people close in age and formed in the same historical period" [10].

The research methods used were: 1) the PARI parental attitudes study questionnaire by E.S. Schaeffer and R.Q. Bell; 2) the author’s questionnaire to obtain information regarding the most popular sources of information about parenthood. Respondents were asked to provide a detailed description of:

- What sources do you use to get information about being a parent, how to better raise your children?

- Name several sources you use to get information about parenting (websites, forums, books, programs, blogs, lectures, etc.).

- What has been the most difficult for you in raising your children?

Results of the Study

First of all, we identified the preferred sources of information regarding child development and upbringing (Figure 3).

Fig. 3. Frequency of use as a source of information on issues of child development and upbringing

We found that all of the study participants primarily rely on the experience of the older generation when it comes to raising children. Parents continue to be the most reliable source of childcare experience, which is encouraging.

At the same time, we see that Group 1 respondents (generation aged 21-32 born in 19 90s) are more inclined than others to use internet sources and blogs. Group 2 respondents (the 33 to 44 age range group, born in 1980s) are more inclined than other groups to turn to the experiences of friends, perhaps this is due to the emergence of parental experience. Young parents face real problems and the easiest thing for them to do is to seek counselling from peers with relevant experience. It can be assumed that this is not the most effective way of gaining competency as the 'counsellors' may not be significantly superior to them in terms of literacy. Group 3 respondents (age range 46 to 53 years, born in 1970s) have little reliance on educational television programs, the internet and blogs as sources about parenting.

The results of the statistical analysis allowed us to record significant differences in the parenting attitudes of participants of different age groups.

Young mothers demonstrate a greater orientation in the age specifics of the child, and it is possible to speak about a confident tendency towards more and more literacy on this issue, as the indicators of younger groups are increasing. At the same time, young mothers are less satisfied with the role of the housewife (U=702.500; p<0.001). Modern women are less oriented towards the family sphere, their self-realization is carried out in a non-family context. At the trend level, we can say that they are characterized by excessive strictness (U=980.500; p=0.077) and the desire to avoid extra-familial influence on the child's development (U=977.000; p=0.073).

Mature women are more oriented towards building optimal emotional contact with the child (U=922.500; p=0.031), the completeness of verbal interaction (U=954.500; p=0.05). They treat the child with more respect, taking into account his/her interests, tend to build partnership relations (U=862.000; p=0.01). It is necessary to state a higher literacy of the study participants born in  1970s generation, when the main reference points in acquiring parental literacy were the experience of older generations and the few scientific sources at that time.

Of course, these differences cannot be unequivocally linked to the source of parenting competence. Certainly, one's own experience of parenthood makes necessary adjustments to the parental position. However, the data of the study indicates that the excessive strictness of the young group participants and absolutization of parental authority are associated with the frequency of using modern popular science literature (Pearson's Chi-square=23.14 at p=0.04 and 24.21 at p=0.019 respectively). While higher communicative competency, which allows for the successful resolution of conflict situations, in the older group is associated with participation in specialized training courses (Pearson's Chi-square=15.31 at p=0.053). The middle age group, the generation of the 1980s, is distinguished by the connection of reference to popular science literature with the desire to build partnership relations with the child (Pearson's Chi-square=14.46 at p=0.043) and the desire to develop the child's activity (Pearson's Chi-square=18.56 at p=0.046).

The obtained results allow us to formulate the following conclusions:

1. The information intended to improve the psychological literacy of parents, placed in the open internet, contains information that distorts the natural logic of the child's mental development, the specifics of child-parent relations and means of upbringing.
2. The modern generation of young parents is increasingly oriented towards internet resources in search of sources to improve their parental competence.
3. The parental position of the generation of young parents against the background of a greater familiarity with the age specifics of the child reveals a tendency towards a decrease in psychological literacy compared to the generations of the 1970s and 1980s.

The results of the study indicate unfavorable trends regarding the state of the psychological literacy of parents. We can welcome the steps that the professional community is taking in the direction of developing psychological and pedagogical programs to improve psychological literacy, creating educational resources that compete with uncontrolled materials [60]. In addition, the data obtained in the study raises the question of the need to examine the content of recommendations on child upbringing posted in the internet.

Functional Psychological Literacy of Parents and Teachers as a Condition of Effective Communication with a Child [Electronic resource]: round table of the journal "Psychological Science and Education": [playlist] // YouTube. 2023. April 25. URL: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLY__a3H0NsDRbWRozOdUzbjQwrXdRgGdY (Accessed 14.11.2023).