The concepts of attachment and attachment behavior are considered from an ethological-evolutionary viewpoint. Attachment behavior and exploration are viewed in balance, and the biological functions of each are discussed. As an illustration of these concepts, a study is reported of 56 white, middle-class infants, 49-51 weeks of age, in a strange situation. The presence of the mother was found to encourage exploratory behavior, her absence to depress exploration and to heighten attachment behaviors. In separation episodes such behaviors as crying and search increased. In reunion episodes proximity-seeking and contact-maintaining behaviors were heightened. In a substantial proportion of Ss, contact-resisting behaviors were also heightened in the reunion episodes, usually in conjunction with contact-maintaining behaviors, thus suggesting ambivalence. Some Ss also displayed proximity-avoiding behavior in relation to the mother in the reunion episodes. These findings are discussed in the context of relevant observational, clinical, and experimental studies of human and nonhuman primates, including studies of mother-child separation. In conclusion, it is urged that the concepts of attachment and attachment behavior be kept broad enough to comprehend the spectrum of the findings of this range of studies.

We examined the relation between 6- and 7-month-old infants' (N = 60) manual activity with objects during free play and their perception of the features of dynamic, multimodal events. Infants were habituated to a single event in which a hand reached for and manipulated a colorful, multifeatured object, and a sound was heard (e.g., a hand squeezed a purple round object, causing a whistling sound) and then their response to events that involved a change in the appearance of the object, the action, or the sound was assessed. Infants responded least to changes in the appearance of the objects, and their sensitivity to this feature was related to their manual activity with objects during free play. Infants' responding to changes in the sound or action was unrelated to motor activity, suggesting that at this age motor achievements related to object exploration are associated with infants' perception of some, but not all, object features.

This study examined perceived parental styles and psychosocial adjustment in 97 Hong Kong Chinese late adolescent girls, using culturally sensitive measures of parenting (warmth, restrictive control, and attributes related to the Chinese philosophy of guan or "training"), and of adjustment. Parenting characteristics associated with guan showed coherence, correlated significantly with parental warmth, and predicted well-being. Contrary to the suggestions of other investigators, restrictive control related negatively to self-esteem and well-being. Maternal control and paternal warmth emerged as important parent style variables in relating to adaptation, and exercized their effects on well-being partly through the mediating agency of self-esteem and relationship harmony. This preliminary study provides an empirical investigation of the impact exercized by a culturally specific dimension proposed for Chinese parenting, and highlights the importance of using culturally sensitive measures of adaptation.

Focuses on a study which compared the exploratory behaviors used by infants who were congenitally blind and infants with normal vision. Background of the study population; List of exploratory behaviors used by infants; Similarities and differences between blind and sighted infants.

The purpose of the study was to examine how maternal authoritative and authoritarian attitudes were manifested in mother-child interactions and relationships in Chinese culture. A sample of 2-year-old children and their mothers (N = 166) in Beijing and Shanghai, People's Republic of China, participated in the study. Information on maternal child-rearing attitudes and mother-child attachment relationships was obtained from mothers' reports. Data concerning maternal parenting strategies, child behaviours, and child reactions to maternal reunion were collected from observations. The results indicated that maternal authoritative attitudes were associated with low power parenting strategies, whereas maternal authoritarian attitudes were associated with enforcement and prohibitory strategies. It was also found that maternal attitudes were associated with child behaviours through the mediation of parenting strategies. However, maternal attitudes might contribute uniquely to mother-child relationships, over and above maternal behaviours. The study provided evidence on the internal coherence of authoritative and authoritarian patterns and their differential significance for child development in urban China.

There is increasing interest in attachment-related social information processing, including children's attentional processing of information regarding the attachment figure. Previous research in middle childhood revealed evidence for a stronger attentional focus toward mother in children with less secure attachment expectations. However, the implication of this attentional focus for children's exploration has not been explored. This study tested the hypothesis that this attentional focus toward mother occurs at the expense of attentional exploration of the environment. Ninety children, aged 8-12, completed questionnaires assessing trust in maternal support, watched a video that induced mild fear of dogs, and completed a dot probe computer task assessing attentional processing of simultaneously presented pictures of mother and pictures of the threatening stimulus (i.e., dogs). Less trust in maternal support was linked to a stronger attentional focus toward the mother pictures versus the dog pictures. These results suggest that, in the presence of mother, children with more secure attachment expectations are better able to freely explore a mildly threatening environment. (PsycINFO Database Record

The present study examined correlates of mastery-related across the infant's second year of life. Maternal control style was quantified on a control to support-of-autonomy continuum, infant-mother attachment was assessed in the Strange Situation, and mastery-related was observed in a toy play session at 12 and 20 months. Infants whose mothers were supportive of their autonomy displayed greater task-oriented persistence and competence during play than did infants of more controlling mothers; securely attached and avoidant infants tended to exhibit greater persistence at tasks than anxious-ambivalent babies, and ambivalent babies were the most negative in affect.

Reviews empirical and conceptual milestones in the literature (1896–1987) on exploratory behavior. Three developmental phases, which are linked to perceptual development, to development of action, and to cognitive development, in the 1st yr of life are suggested and analyzed. Phase 1, the neonate phase, is followed by Phase 2 at 4–5 mos, in which infants pay attention to affordances and distinctive features of objects. Phase 3 involves ambulatory exploration. The author argues that evolution has provided infants with action and sensory systems that equip them to discover the world. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

For some children, the cultural climate within their homes derives from the dominant cultural climate and mirrors it. For other children, the cultural climate of the home may differ quite significantly from the cultural climate of society at large, such as in the case of recently immigrated families from many foreign countries. Our foundational theme is that many children in the United States (and other immigrant-receiving countries) are raised in home cultures that place a higher relative value on interdependence as a goal of development than does the dominant surrounding culture, in which independence is more highly valued. Value systems oriented toward interdependence derive from families' ancestral cultures, often Latin American, Asian, African, Native American, or Native Hawaiian. A cultural orientation towards independence yields one pathway through universal developmental issues; a cultural orientation towards interdependence yields a different one. In societies where the independence orientation is dominant (such as the United States), these diverging pathways can cause children and families with a more interdependent home culture to be caught in a conflicting cross-current of socializing influences. Because of the large number of immigrant and native families in the United States, such conflict constitutes a significant social problem. Our chapter begins by summarizing cultural and cross-cultural research worldwide that documents the interdependent and independent pathways of development. It proceeds to document the clash of these cultural pathways through human development in the United States. Based on this body of evidence, we formulate suggestions to pediatricians, social workers, and other professionals concerning ways to lessen the human cost of these cross-cultural value conflicts. Finally, we describe and evaluate interventions designed to reduce cross-cultural value conflict in the lives of children growing up in a multicultural society.

This study examined the effects of contextual and individual differences on mothers' autonomy support versus control on homeworklike tasks. Sixty mothers and their third-grade children worked on map and poem tasks, with mothers in either an ego-involving (high pressure) or a non-ego-involving (low pressure) condition. Later, children worked on similar tasks themselves. Mothers in the high-pressure condition were more controlling on the poem task. For the map task, mothers who came in with controlling styles and received the high-pressure manipulation were most controlling. Children whose mothers interacted in a more controlling manner wrote less creative when alone. Results suggest the importance of context, children's competence levels, and mothers' styles in determining levels of autonomy support.

Three dimensions of parent style--autonomy support, involvement, and provision of structure--were studied using 64 mothers and 50 fathers of children in grades 3 through 6. Focus was on defining parental influences on children's school-related adjustment and performance. The three aspects of home environment were differentially associated with varied school outcomes. (SLD)

ABSTRACT Here we advocate a broad perspective on attachment and exploration, as influenced by children's experiences with both mothers and fathers. For each issue we discuss, we present studies exploring the influence of fathers alongside those exploring the influence of mothers. In this chapter, the concept of "security of exploration" as a companion to secure attachment is introduced. We define "secure exploration" in the early years as confident, attentive, eager, and resourceful exploration of materials or tasks, especially when a child is facing disappointment. We begin this chapter by discussing the concept of secure exploration in greater detail. In the next section, we review studies showing that both a secure child-mother attachment and a father's sensitive and challenging support of a child's exploration influence the child's (and, later, the adolescent's) secure exploration of cognitive challenges. An interesting corollary is also discussed: An increasing number of studies provide evidence that a secure child-mother attachment and a supportive father-child relationship are associated with less gender-stereotypic behavior in both girls and boys. In the subsequent section, we review research exploring the relation between secure child-parent relationships and a child's resourceful transition and adaptation to new social as well as intellectually challenging situations in which the parents are not present. These situations include transitions into and adaptation to preschool, kindergarten, later school grades, and college. The last section addresses three issues: (1) the under-emphasized effects of fathers on children's relationships with close friends and siblings; (2) the influence of parent-child relationships during infancy, childhood, and adolescence on young adults' attachment and partnership representations, in our north German longitudinal study; and (3) the present status of the wider view of attachment, including security of exploration and the unique contributions of mothers and fathers to general psychological security. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

ABSTRACT in this chapter, I have drawn a distinction between (a) components of identity that arise out of choices made available to individuals in their social contexts and (b) components of identity over which individuals have no choice but around which they must construct meaning / in order for the identity literature to address issues such as coherence of personality and continuity over time, it is critical that we identify the similarities and differences in the identity process for assigned and chosen components and that we then understand conceptually how the different components of identity fit together into a whole / adoptive identity was used as an example of an assigned component, and several avenues by which assigned and chosen components of identity might interact were proposed "chosen" identity: structure and process / "assigned" identity: the case of adopted children / interaction of assigned and chosen components of identity (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Abstract There are several different theoretical and research approaches to the study of socialization, characterized by frequently competing basic tenets and apparently contradictory evidence. As a way of integrating approaches and understanding discrepancies, it is proposed that socialization processes be viewed from a domain perspective, with each domain characterized by a particular form of social interaction between the object and agent of socialization and by specific socialization mechanisms and outcomes. It is argued that this approach requires researchers to identify the domain of social interaction they are investigating, to understand that phenotypically similar behaviors may belong to different domains, and to acknowledge that caregivers who are effective in one type of interaction may not be effective in another.

This study investigated trajectories of parenting behaviours and children’s development from infancy to early childhood, associations between parenting behaviours and children’s development and how these associations vary according to socioeconomic indicators. Mothers and children were examined from an ongoing longitudinal study of families resident in the geographic area of Avon in the UK. Using growth curve modelling, four waves of data were examined when the children were 6–42 months old. Findings suggest that timing is an important factor in the relationship between parenting and children’s development. The positive association between mother–child interactions and children’s development was evident 12 months later, whereas engagement in outside activities had both concurrent and later positive associations with children’s development. Maternal education was also highlighted as a significant moderator suggesting that interactive parenting may have a protective role for children whose mothers have lower education.

Abstract In order to understand typical and atypical developmental trajectories it is important to assess how strengths or weaknesses in one domain may be affecting performance in other domains. This study examined longitudinal relations between early fine motor functioning, visuospatial cognition, exploration, and language development in preschool children with ASD and children with other developmental delays/disorders. The ASD group included 63 children at T1 (Mage = 27.10 months, SD = 8.71) and 46 children at T2 (Mage = 45.85 months, SD = 7.16). The DD group consisted of 269 children at T1 (Mage = 17.99 months, SD = 5.59), and 121 children at T2 (Mag e= 43.51 months, SD = 3.81). A subgroup nested within the total sample was randomly selected and studied in-depth on exploratory behavior. This group consisted of 50 children, 21 children with ASD (Mage = 27.57, SD = 7.09) and 29 children with DD (Mage = 24.03 months, SD = 6.42). Fine motor functioning predicted language in both groups. Fine motor functioning was related to visuospatial cognition in both groups and related to object exploration, spatial exploration, and social orientation during exploration only in the ASD group. Visuospatial cognition and all exploration measures were related to both receptive and expressive language in both groups. The findings are in line with the embodied cognition theory, which suggests that cognition emerges from and is grounded in the bodily interactions of an agent with the environment. This study emphasizes the need for researchers and clinicians to consider cognition as emergent from multiple interacting systems. Copyright 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Three studies investigated: the effect of parent involvement on the exploratory behaviors of children rated as high-, moderate-, or low-explorers; whether maternal presence increased the exploration of low-exploratory children, decreased the exploration of high-exploratory children, or both; and whether maternal presence or mother/child interaction was responsible for the absence of assessment-level effects in studies 1 and 2. (RH)

Abstract To measure exploratory play at 1 yr of age, 41 middle-class infants were observed in a free-play setting. In a separate session, 11 structured tasks assessed the infants' persistence in mastering tasks. In a 3rd session, the Bayley Scales of Infant Development were given. As part of another study, home observations were available for 40 of the infants at 1 yr of age and for 23 of the infants at 6 mo of age. Measures of quantitative aspects of exploratory play showed no relationship to persistence or cognitive development; however, measures indexing the quality of exploratory play did. In addition, environmental measures at both 6 and 12 mo were related to exploratory play at 1 yr, particularly to the production of perceptual effects; but some of these findings were opposite to those expected. Results suggest that the quality of exploratory play, rather than the quantity, is a better index of underlying mastery motivation. In addition, the widely accepted assumption of a link between the amount of general exploration and cognitive ability needs to be reexamined. (27 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

ABSTRACT This article describes research on parenting that supports children's need for autonomy. First, the authors define parental autonomy support and distinguish it from permissiveness or independence promotion. The authors also define psychologically controlling parenting and distinguish it from behavioral control (structure). Second, the authors present studies examining how parental autonomy support promotes healthy development. Indeed, clear and consistent positive effects arise from different types of studies, conducted with children of various ages. Parent observation studies suggest that parental autonomy support is associated with infants' motivation and toddlers' internalization. Parent interview studies reveal that an autonomy-supportive parental attitude relates to children's adjustment at school. Children self-report studies demonstrate a clear link between perceptions of parental autonomy support and psychosocial functioning amongst adolescents. Third, the correlates and precursors of parental psychological control and autonomy support are presented, with a special focus on parents' trust in their children's ability to develop in an autonomous manner. Finally, ideas for future research are suggested. Although self-determination theory is not strictly a developmental theory, it seems highly pertinent to the socialization of children, their internalization and development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Background: Research has shown that interactions between young children’s temperament and the quality of care they receive predict the emergence of positive and negative socioemotional developmental outcomes. This multimethod study addresses such interactions, using observed and mother-rated measures of difficult temperament, children’s committed, self-regulated compliance and externalizing problems, and mothers’ responsiveness in a low-income sample.Methods: In 186 thirty-month-old children, difficult temperament was observed in the laboratory (as poor effortful control and high anger proneness), and rated by mothers. Mothers’ responsiveness was observed in lengthy naturalistic interactions at 30 and 33 months. At 40 months, children’s committed compliance and externalizing behavior problems were assessed using observations and several well-established maternal report instruments.Results: Parallel significant interactions between child difficult temperament and maternal responsiveness were found across both observed and mother-rated measures of temperament. For difficult children, responsiveness had a significant effect such that those children were more compliant and had fewer externalizing problems when they received responsive care, but were less compliant and had more behavior problems when they received unresponsive care. For children with easy temperaments, maternal responsiveness and developmental outcomes were unrelated. All significant interactions reflected the diathesis-stress model. There was no evidence of differential susceptibility, perhaps due to the pervasive stress present in the ecology of the studied families.Conclusions: Those findings add to the growing body of evidence that for temperamentally difficult children, unresponsive parenting exacerbates risks for behavior problems, but responsive parenting can effectively buffer risks conferred by temperament.

This study examines the prospective links between early maternal mind-mindedness, including references to different types of mental states, and child subsequent expressive vocabulary. Eighty-four mother–infant dyads took part in two assessments. At one year of age, maternal mind-mindedness was assessed during mother–child free play in the home, and at two years, mothers completed the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory to evaluate children's expressive vocabulary. Maternal mind-mindedness was related to children's expressive language, above and beyond family socio-economic status. Specifically, only maternal comments on child cognitions were related to children's expressive language. The findings suggest that maternal mind-mindedness is relevant to understanding children's language development while highlighting the importance of considering the exact nature of mind-related comments.

Internal working models are based on young children’s expectations for the behavior of their attachment figures that develop into broader representations of their relational experiences, and decision rules about how to interact with others. These internal working models are thought to influence the child’s subsequent processing of social experiences and allow the child to anticipate, plan for, and adapt to his or her social world. Current research studies largely concentrated on the internal working models of attachment in childhood and adulthood; very little inquiry has been conducted on internal working models of preverbal infants and toddlers. It was not until 2007 that a study by Johnson, Dweck and Chen had found evidence for infants’ internal working models of attachment using a habituation paradigm. In addition, some theorists and researchers have indicated that maternal sensitivity is associated with internal working models in childhood; and also it has been suggested that maternal sensitivity may affect toddler’s attachment status. Therefore, internal working models may play an important role in relationship between maternal sensitivity and toddler’s attachment status. However, there is inadequate research on maternal sensitivity and internal working models in infancy. The present study explored the relationship between toddlers’ attachment status, maternal sensitivity and internal working models of toddlers. We hypothesized that toddlers of different attachment status might have unique patterns of expectations about their mother’s responsive behavior, and the expectations might correspond to maternal sensitivity in caregiver-infant interactions. Forty-one toddlers (M = 14.01 months, SD = 0.81) and their mothers from middle class backgrounds participated in the study. A visual habituation study using abstract animations with separation and reunion events was conducted to test a part of the toddlers’ internal working models—their expectations of a caregiver’s responsiveness. Toddlers’ attachment status was assessed by the Strange Situation procedure. Maternal sensitivity in caregiver–toddler interactions was measured by Maternal Behavior Q-Sort. The data was analyzed using repeated-measure analysis of variance, chi-square analyses, paired t tests, q-factor analysis and LCA. Results were as follows: (1) Toddlers’ expectations of a caregiver’s responsiveness depended on their own attachment status: insecure toddlers expected their caregivers to withhold comfort; (2) Toddlers’ expectations of a caregiver’s responsiveness depended on their mother’s behavior: the toddlers of Self-centered mothers expected caregivers to be unresponsive; (3) The results found by LCA indicated that there were two types of attachment system: Category 1, the toddlers of Child-centered mothers tended to expect their caregivers to be responsive, and showed secure attachment behaviors. Category 2, the toddlers of Self-centered mothers tended to expect their caregivers to be unresponsive, and showed insecure attachment behaviors in Strange Situation procedure. These results indicated that it was effective to using a visual habituation procedure to measure internal working models of preverbal toddlers. The claims that toddlers’ internal working models play an important role in the relationship between maternal sensitivity and toddler’s attachment status can be supported. If we want to change the attachment status of toddlers through their internal working models, we should pay attention to the behavior of their mothers.

The purpose of the study was to examine the contributions of maternal encouragement of autonomy and maternal encouragement of connectedness to the prediction of children's social behaviors. A sample of children (N = 94), initially aged two years, and their mothers in China participated in the two-year longitudinal study. Child autonomy and connectedness and maternal goal-oriented behaviors were assessed at two years of age through the observation of mother child interactions. Data on children's social participation, prosocial behavior, aggression, and organization/leadership in peer interactions were collected in a follow-up study when the children were four years of age. It was found that maternal encouragement of connectedness significantly predicted children's sociability and organization/leadership behavior, especially for children who were relatively high on autonomy. The results indicated the developmental significance of socialization goal-oriented behaviors in cultural context.

This study describes infants behaviors with objects in relation to age, body position, and object properties. Object behaviors were assessed longitudinally in 22 healthy infants supine, prone, and sitting from birth through 2 years. Results reveal: (1) infants learn to become intense and sophisticated explorers within the first 6 months of life; (2) young infants dynamically and rapidly shift among a variety of behavioral combinations to gather information; (3) behaviors on objects develop along different trajectories so that behavioral profiles vary across time; (4) object behaviors are generally similar in supine and sitting but diminished in prone; and (5) infants begin matching certain behaviors to object properties as newborns. These data demonstrate how infants learn to match their emerging behaviors with changing positional constraints and object affordances.

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of early and current maternal autonomy support, and of its stability over time, in predicting child executive functioning (EF). Seventy-eight mother hild dyads participated in two visits when children were aged 15months (T1) and 3years (T2), allowing for the assessment of maternal autonomy support (T1 and T2) and child EF (T2). The results showed that autonomy support at 15months and the average level of autonomy support displayed by the mothers between 15months and 3years were significant predictors of child EF, whereas current autonomy support was not. Group comparison techniques showed that children of mothers who displayed low autonomy support at both 15months and 3years performed the worst on EF. These results speak to the relevance of using multiple assessments of parenting behavior when examining its impact on child cognitive development.

In considering Bowlby's (1969/1982) conceptualization of attachment as a "biobehavioral safety-regulating system," Goldberg, Grusec, & Jenkins (1999) proposed that maternal sensitivity to infant distress may be particularly relevant to the formation of a secure attachment relationship. Data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care provided a unique opportunity to address this question as maternal sensitivity to nondistress and distress were each coded for 357 mother-infant dyads at 6 months and 230 dyads at 15 months from videotaped observations of mother-infant play sessions. Attachment security was assessed in the Strange Situation at 15 months. Logistic regression analyses indicated that greater sensitivity to distress (but not greater sensitivity to nondistress) at 6 months was associated with increased odds of being classified as secure. The 15-month sensitivity measures were nonsignificant predictors of security. The results support the notion that the protective function of the child-mother attachment relationship may be especially salient during early infancy.

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to discuss the relationship between the haptic and visual systems during infant's bimodal interaction with objects. Four general topics are discussed: the role of exploratory activity in perception, the specific ways in which the two systems are related during exploration, developments over age in the relationship between the systems, and the impact of the organism/environment relationship on these developments.

Abstract Researchers, educators, and parents have long believed that children learn cause and effect relationships through exploratory play. However, previous research suggests that children are poor at designing informative experiments; children fail to control relevant variables and tend to alter multiple variables simultaneously. Thus, little is known about how children's spontaneous exploration might support accurate causal inferences. Here the authors suggest that children's exploratory play is affected by the quality of the evidence they observe. Using a novel free-play paradigm, the authors show that preschoolers (mean age: 57 months) distinguish confounded and unconfounded evidence, preferentially explore causally confounded (but not matched unconfounded) toys rather than novel toys, and spontaneously disambiguate confounded variables in the course of free play. Copyright 2007 APA.

The present experiment examined whether the mental rotation ability of 9-month-old infants was related to their abilities to crawl and manually explore objects. Forty-eight 9-month-old infants were tested; half of them had been crawling for an average of 9.365weeks. The infants were habituated to a video of a simplified Shepard–Metzler object rotating back and forth through a 240° angle around the longitudinal axis of the object. They were tested with videos of the same object rotating through a previously unseen 120° angle and with a mirror image of the display. All of the infants also participated in a manual object exploration task, in which they freely explored five toy blocks. The results showed that the crawlers looked significantly longer at the novel (mirror) object than at the familiar object, independent of their manual exploration scores. The non-crawlers looking times, in contrast, were influenced by the manual exploration scores. The infants who did not spontaneously explore the toy blocks tended to show a familiarity preference, whereas those who explored the toy blocks preferred to look at the novel object. Thus, all of the infants were able to master the mental rotation task but it seemed to be the most complex process for infants who had no crawling experience and who did not spontaneously explore objects.

There is much to digest in a 30 year longitudinal study of the developing person (Sroufe, Egeland, Carlson, & Collins, 2005a). The following paper summarizes some key points regarding the place of infant attachment in the developmental course. It is argued that understanding the role of attachment entails grasping the organizational nature of the attachment construct and embracing a non-linear transactional model. Using such concepts, attachment history was shown in the Minnesota study to be clearly related to the growth of self-reliance, the capacity for emotional regulation, and the emergence and course of social competence, among other things. Moreover, specific patterns of attachment had implications for both normal development and pathology. Even more important than such linkages, however, study of the place of early attachment in later adaptation reveals much about developmental processes underlying both continuity and change. Findings are overviewed concerning the complex links between attachment and ultimate outcomes and the preservation of early patterns even during times of change. In all, these findings have implications both for future research and for clinical application.

Abstract A differential susceptibility hypothesis proposes that children may differ in the degree to which parenting qualities affect aspects of child development. Infants with difficult temperaments may be more susceptible to the effects of parenting than infants with less difficult temperaments. Using latent change curve analyses to analyze data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care, the current study found that temperament moderated associations between maternal parenting styles during early childhood and children first-grade academic competence, social skills, and relationships with teachers and peers. Relations between parenting and first-grade outcomes were stronger for difficult than for less difficult infants. Infants with difficult temperaments had better adjustment than less difficult infants when parenting quality was high and poorer adjustment when parenting quality was lower.

Abstract 6-month-old infants selected on irritability shortly after birth and their mothers were randomly assigned to 2 intervention and 2 control groups to test the hypothesis that enhancing maternal sensitive responsiveness will improve quality of mother-infant interaction, infant exploration, and attachment. The intervention lasted 3 months and ended when the child was 9 months of age. When infants were 9 months of age, intervention group mothers were significantly more responsive, stimulating, visually attentive, and controlling of their infant's behavior than control group mothers. Intervention infants had higher scores than control infants on sociability, self-soothing, and exploration, and they cried less. Quality of exploration also improved, with intervention infants engaged in cognitively sophisticated kinds of exploration more than control infants. At 12 months of age, significantly more intervention group dyads were securely attached than control group dyads.

Adults can learn a great deal about young children’s development by watching them play with toys or other objects. Insights derived from theoretical and empirical explorations of object play are particularly useful for early childhood professionals who assess the development of preschool children with disabilities. The following discussion reviews theoretical and empirical literature relevant to young children’s object play and suggests implications of research findings for practitioners. The review emphasizes the cognitive prerequisites for object play, the sequential development of object play, the relationship between play and language, and the characteristics of object play in young children with developmental disabilities.

Although security of attachment is conceptualised as a balance between infants' attachment and exploratory behaviours, parental behaviours pertaining to infant exploration have received relatively little empirical attention. Drawing from self-determination theory, this study seeks to improve the prediction of infant attachment by assessing maternal autonomy-support during infant exploration, in addition to maternal sensitivity. Seventy-one dyads participated in two home visits. Maternal sensitivity was assessed when the infants were 12 months old, whereas maternal autonomy-support and infant attachment were assessed at 15 months. The results revealed that autonomy-support explained an additional portion of the variance in attachment when maternal socioeconomic status and sensitivity were controlled. These results speak to the relevance of a theory-driven approach to examining maternal behaviours in the context of child exploration.