How does a psychotic mother affect the emotional development of her child? Studies have found that mental illness in the family and intra-family conflict are important concomitants of neurosis, but most studies have failed to link the child's experiences with a mentally ill mother clearly with later development of a similar mental illness. Our own studies of released mental patients led us to an examination of their "parenting" roles, and from there into the question of the genetic transmission of schizophrenia. We began to study the genetic theory of mental illness, specifically, the transmission of schizophrenia. The study's comparison samples were distributed as follows: 57 children of welfare recipients, 24 children of convicts, 50 children of matched controls, and 51 children of random normals. Since the genetic theories of the transmission of schizophrenia are of concern in this report, our analysis centers on children of schizophrenic mothers. Children of welfare recipients are used to control for stigma and "official" poverty, children of matched socio-economic status control for "normal" urban poverty, and children of the randomly selected sample to tell us what "average" urban children were experiencing during the 15 years from 1956 to 1971. (Author/JM)